


Sucker Punch

by foux_dogue



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Corporate Dystopia AU that Nobody Asked For (??), Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - What We Do in the Shadows AU (?), And other spooky appearances, Dark Comedy, Djinn Claude, Explicit Language, Ghost Felix, Incubus Sylvain, M/M, Plain ol’ human Caspar, Sexual Content, Some dubcon/violence for monsters doing monstrous things, Succubus Dorothea, Vampire Edelgard, Vampire Hubert, Vampire Linhardt, Werewolf Ingrid, werewolf dimitri
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-01-03 03:50:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 43,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21172952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foux_dogue/pseuds/foux_dogue
Summary: Funnily enough, there is no better nest for monsters than a call center.Sure, the fluorescent lighting does nothing for his complexion, but although a foggy graveyard might have been a better backdrop for a bloodsucker like Linhardt, the bodies he’d find there would already be regrettably deceased.His deliciously dead-eyed coworkers, on the other hand, arranged into neat files at their desks like a line of grocery store apples on display?It’s convenient, to say the least.The only downside is that he isn’t the only one who’s had this revelation. Not that he’d ever been bothered to demean himself into fighting over something as primitive as territory before.At least not until that man with a head of ridiculous blue hair arrived.





	1. Please Tell Me That You Didn’t Eat Erik

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, glad I can finally be the one to satisfy all of those requests for a FE3H fic set in a modern-day call center. 
> 
> ...Right? 
> 
> I’ve been desperate to try my hand at something that isn’t an angst-filled high fantasy, so thank you in advance for humoring me :)

“No, please,” the woman begged, her ample bosom testing the limits of her bodice’s laces, “don’t!”

She crossed her arms into a graceful shape above her face, careful not to block the near-euphoric look of dread that had parted her lips into a gasping _O_. The man ignored her, flipping his black cape open with the shove of his arm as he swept upon her. Cruel laughter filled the air as he grabbed her at the shoulders, her head tipping to the side in submission even before he’d had the chance to force it there. He looked hungrily at the pale bow of her throat, his dark brows furrowed into a villainous point.

“Please!” She cringed as his mouth came closer.

“Lady Barbara,” the creature hissed, his voice cold and creaking, “you should have never come here!”

She looked away in horror, her eyes cast to the heavens for retribution. Perhaps her prayers were answered. Suddenly a beam of light filled the cobwebbed room. The monster howled in fury as great pillars of smoke began to billow from his shoulders.

“No!” He shrieked, his claws releasing the woman to tear at the air. “Nooo!”

The fair maiden ran sobbing into the arms of her savior, a man nearly twice her height and sporting a handsomely-dimpled chin who’d had the forethought to draw the curtains of a nearby window. 

“You’re safe now,” he cooed as the monster burst into flames. She nodded and pressed her breasts with appreciation against his burly chest.

“Ridiculous,” Linhardt muttered dryly, snatching the remote to turn the channel. The hero and his damsel-no-longer-distressed were replaced by a middle-aged man enthusiastically clearing leaves from a gutter with some sort of hose-muzzled machine that was (a set of pulsing yellow letter proclaimed) available to even someone like Linhardt for the low, low price of twenty-nine-ninety-five.

“What is?”

The question came from the man settled on the ground and between his knees, still naked and slick-skinned from all of the tumbling they done together some moments before. Linhardt had already dressed himself again in a pair of joggers (_not_ sweatpants; he wasn’t some kind of heathen — although it wasn’t like he was much for _jogging_, either) and a thin t-shirt that would have been wrinkled if it’d been owned by anyone else. After all, it wasn’t terribly dignified to lounge around outside one’s bedroom in the nude.

Not that it had been dignified to allow that man — Ethan? Elliot? — to do what he’d done, either, and right there on that very same tastefully mid-century couch. But that was besides the point.

“That,” he replied, gesturing at the television with the remote. Elliot— no, Erik, it was definitely Erik — looked at the screen before tilting his head back with a confused stare.

“You live in an apartment. What do you care about gutters?” It was a _townhouse_, really, but... well, semantics.

“No, not that,” Linhardt corrected, thumbing the button again to switch away from the Tornado Pro Gutter Master to the smoking pile that had once been that oh-so frightening bloodsucker from before. Erik did not look yet convinced. Linhardt sighed.

“Survival of the fittest,” he explained, already bored. “Do you honestly think that there could be a whole species of creatures who could build an entire civilized society — castles, _capes_ — while being unable to go out into the sunlight? A rather reliable thing, you know, the sun.”

“You mean vampires?” Erik cocked one of his eyebrows at him. It was well-manicured: not plucked but waxed. A tidy touch, if perhaps a little overdone. The same could be said about the blond himself. “What about bats?”

“What about them?”

“Well, they’re nocturnal, too.”

“Bats don’t burst into flames when they make the mistake of staying out too late,” Linhardt sniffed. Erik shrugged.

“Yeah, but, I mean, they’re real.”

“I do suppose that is the difference,” Linhardt sighed. Erik laughed.

“You’re weird.”

“That too,” Linhardt agreed. Erik grinned before turning back to watch the busty damsel on the screen wave her handkerchief in her hero’s direction. Linhardt leaned forward to trace his fingers over the man’s bare shoulder. He was a little skinny. It wasn’t so terribly obvious when he was wearing those horrible polos of his, but close like this he could see the knobs of his spine. Not that it was unattractive, just that Linhardt was generally drawn to men with a little more meat on their bones.

No matter.

Erik shivered as he danced his fingers along his nape.

“Damn, already?” The man laughed. “You’re insatiable.”

Linhardt hummed in agreement before leaning forward to sink his teeth into that vein pulsing so prettily above his collarbone.

* * *

“Morning, Linhardt!” He wasn’t entirely certain he agreed. It was true what he’d said the night before to poor old Erik — it wasn’t like he’d burst into flames when the sun snuck through the blinds of his bedroom window, but he wasn’t particularly thrilled about it, either. Working on a full stomach made it even worse. All he wanted was to curl up and sleep with Desdemona (the cat, not that doomed Venetian) for the day. Perhaps the month. That seemed even better. 

“Good morning, Annette,” he said. It wasn’t that he meant to, just that the insufferable woman would linger at his desk until he had. He sunk into his chair and stared listlessly at the bouncing smiley face of his computer’s sleeping monitor. _Have a Santerrific Day!_, the smiley face proclaimed.

Linhardt had not had a Santerrific Day since he’d started working at Sant-Blanc, a mid-tier healthcare provider recently outsourced in its most unglamorous parts to their sleepy little town. He was quite certain, in fact, that he’d not had a Santerrific Day in the two thousand six hundred and thirty two years that he’d been alive.

Er. Dead. Whatever the proper term was.

Not that he was going to bother to learn how to change his screensaver. And he’d already eaten the only IT person who wasn’t completely unbearable, so that stupid fucking smiley face was there to stay.

“Oh,” Annette continued as he reached forward to shake his mouse. “Actually, Hubert asked that you go to his office before you log in.” Linhardt shut his eyes and tried to think of something pleasant instead of that putrid man with his putrid name. It failed until his mind was filled with a full dancing suite of Hubert’s over-oiled comb-over.

“Fine,” he sighed, his chair squeaking as he stood again. The office had begun to fill as he’d taken on the task of greeting Annette. Now he had to waltz and dodge his way through a minefield of rolling chairs. There was something positively villainous about the idea of an open office. In a different life he might have adopted some of the principles himself — maybe a labyrinth without so many corridors, or would that just be a holding tank?

In any case, that sort of thing had lost its panache when humans had stopped living in those little filthy hovels swarming the castles he’d once preferred. Or maybe he was just losing his touch in his old age. Nothing wrong with that. One couldn’t be at the top of his game forever. 

“Morning, Lin,” Sylvain called out to him from the water cooler. He could smell the brimstone of him from across the room. _Fucking incubus_. He curled his lip at him. It earned him a cheery wink in return. Not that it was particularly fair for Linhardt to be so nasty with him. After all, Sylvain had been the first to brag about his conquest of the call center.

_Look_, he’d said during one evening when Linhardt had been feeling particularly diplomatic, _they’ve got fifty, sixty people all working there, and I bet you not one of them could tell you the name of the guy working six seats away from him. Plus, half of them seem ready to off themselves without any further intervention. And the best part is that they’re always hiring._ He’d waggled his eyebrows at him to accentuate the point. _Attrition, my friend._

Not that Linhardt was his friend. He didn’t like the idea of _friends_. They didn’t make much sense when you made a diet out of men and generally outlived monsters like Sylvain. And, moreover, he was convinced that the only friend that _Sylvain_ had himself was Felix, a man Sylvain had seduced however many hundreds of years before and had been so furious at him for it that he’d crawled back out of his coffin as a wraith. Particularly nasty, wraiths, and even more so when they’d been whatever the hell it was he’d been as a living man (some sort of warrior, as most men like him were — something Celtic, when Celtic had meant Gaul, if he remembered correctly, although honestly he hadn’t been listening when he’d been told). 

In any case, Sylvain was annoying. The only reason he’d tolerated him to begin with was because his own appetites didn’t conflict with his. After all, it didn’t matter to Linhardt if a man had his soul when he was draining him dry. Better that he didn’t, really. It was a bit like fast food. Sure, it wasn’t the healthiest thing in the world, particularly if Sylvain had just fucked it, but it was quick and easy.

Felix didn’t eat anything. He was always so busy sulking at Sylvain’s side that it was easy enough to ignore him entirely. Actually, he was alright.

“Linhardt.”

“Shit,” he gasped as the man — well, poltergeist — greeted him as he returned from whatever he’d been doing in the direction of Hubert’s office. Something mean, he hoped. He nodded at him but didn’t reply. It wasn’t rude (not that either of them would have given a damn if it had been). The humans typing away at their desks couldn’t see him, after all, and Linhardt had a carefully curated persona to maintain. A persona that didn’t talk to himself, that is, or at least did so as infrequently as possible.

“Linhardt,” another voice echoed, cold and grating. He rolled his eyes and walked as slowly as possible towards the cheap veneer of Hubert’s door. It took most of his self control to stop from laughing as he spotted him glaring at him from behind his desk. Hubert was the type of vampire who took themselves entirely too seriously. He wouldn’t be surprised if he woke each morning to stare wistfully at a closet full of capes, counting down the decades until they were once more en vogue, before he pulled on those terrible black polyester suits of his instead.

It must have been exhausting.

“I saw you on the television last night,” Linhardt drawled as he shut the door behind him and sat with much reluctance in the ugly maroon chair waiting for him.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Linhardt yawned and rubbed his eyes. “What do you want?” Hubert scowled at him, his elbows propped against the desk and hands folded at his mouth as if he was about to order him impaled or something equally medieval. Linhardt’s eyes lingered on the plastic spider plant hanging dusty and forgotten from the ceiling tiles.

“Please tell me that you didn’t eat Erik Middleson,” Hubert replied stonily. Linhardt sunk into his seat and began to pick idly at its fraying arms.

“I didn’t eat Erik Middleson.”

“_Linhardt_.” He narrowed his eyes slightly as he finally met Hubert’s gaze. Hubert made a good show of sneering back at him. In any other circumstance it would have been a dangerous mistake. Linhardt was nearly twice his age, after all, and no amount of glowering could make up for that. But what was the point in messing with something as mind-numbingly dull as hierarchy? Besides, it would be at least three times as difficult to find a place to stash away Hubert’s body than it had been with sweet Erik Middleson’s, after all.

“If you already know the answer to your question,” Linhardt countered, “then whatever is the point in asking?” Hubert sucked in a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Erik had the highest customer satisfaction score out of the entire team for the last two quarters. Corporate was planning on promoting him to a lead role.”

“How disappointing that he didn’t have the pleasure.”

“You need to start going after lower hanging fruit.”

“Or what, exactly?” Linhardt fiddled with his lanyard, his eyes lingering on his employee badge. He looked a little pale in his photo. Is that what he always looked like? Maybe he needed a tan. After all, he didn’t want to be mistaken for Hubert. He was half-convinced that the idiot slept feet-first in the hallway broom closet when no one was looking. “You won’t get your invitation to the annual retreat? What a shame. I hear this year they're considering _Cleveland_. Whatever will you do?”

“Please stop eating top performers,” is all Hubert said with his thin-worn reply. Linhardt rolled his eyes.

“You need to stop being so sensitive. It’s going to get you into trouble.”

“What?” If they’d had the blood to do it, Linhardt suspected Hubert would have blushed.

“Do you think Erik worried over which chicken clucked the best before he boiled it for one of those terribly uninspired lunches of his?” Hubert frowned but didn’t answer. “And don’t think that I don’t know about that redhead of yours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mhm.” Linhardt craned his neck from side to side, feeling positively drained now that he’d been forced into the task of socializing. “Is that all, then?”

“Yes,” Hubert muttered, not doing a fantastic job of hiding his newly miserable mood. “Oh. No. Today was the last day of this month’s new hire orientation. I’ve given that empty desk next to yours to one of them.” He reached forward to fish through a stack of paper. “Caspar... von Bergliez is his name. He’s a recent State graduate — business administration. Not terribly bright, but he scored well on the personality tests. If it isn’t too difficult to restrain yourself, can you please ensure that his heart keeps beating for at least the remainder of the fiscal year? And not just you but Sylvain as well — you know how he likes the stupid ones.”

“Fine,” Linhardt sighed, supposing that it was not so terrible a trade for how satisfying dear Erik had been. He stood before Hubert had the chance to saddle him with anything else. Hubert let him leave. Maybe he would crawl into some coffin afterwards and cross his arms over his chest to sulk about Linhardt’s cruel treatment. He’d always been a bit of a baby beneath his carefully applied eyeliner (and not very subtle, that, no matter what he thought).

He returned into the bullpen of the main office to find Sylvain lurking behind one of the accounts payable cronies and looking nearly as desperate as Felix looked murderous crouched unseen on the divider of the poor victim’s cubicle. What a headache. Not that he knew what that felt like, but he was certain that if he could it would have been a proper hammer strike by the time he returned to his own desk to find a man in a neon yellow windbreaker hovering nervously beside it.

“Hi! Hello!” The man blurted at him as he tried his best to sneak into his chair unseen. If only he’d been transparent like Felix, the lucky bastard.

“Hello,” he managed thinly, his eyes settling on the ridiculous blue of the man’s hair. It was the color of those blue raspberry suckers he’d seen on gas station countertops during his brief stint of harvesting weary road-trippers (not a bad gig, really, if not for those filthy bathrooms). In the very many years he’d been alive, he’d never once seen a blue raspberry in the wild. He wondered idly if this man before him had the same artificial taste.

“My name is Caspar. Nice to meet you!” The man shoved his hand in Linhardt’s direction. Linhardt eyed his fingers with trepidation before reluctantly slotting his own palm forward. “Wow! Your hands are cold!” Caspar laughed and pumped his hand with a tooth-chattering swing.

“Linhardt.”

“What?”

“My name.”

“Oh!” Caspar laughed again. “Right. Right! Well, I look forward to working with you!” He stripped his obnoxious jacket from his shoulders and draped it crookedly from the back of his chair. “It’s my first day today.” He rubbed his arms briskly. “I’m a little nervous.”

“There’s a script,” Linhardt replied, intending to be objective rather than reassuring. Caspar smiled.

“Right, right. A script.” Caspar looked at the thick binder waiting for him at his desk. One of the corners was scuffed and turned up at an angle. “A _script_.”

Linhardt nodded and sat. His computer slowly buzzed to life, the queue of calls he was supposed to make already ready for him on the screen. One hundred twenty-seven of them, to be exact. One hundred twenty-seven opportunities for a nap, and only briefly interrupted by his lazy reading of that same script ready for him at his right elbow.

He could have memorized it, of course, but that certainly wasn’t worth the effort. When you lived to the ripe old age he had you learned to prioritize. The call center was a perfect environment for such a practice. That is to say, he did very little; enough so that Hubert would have no doubt fired him months earlier if not for the fact that Linhardt would have done something rather nasty to him if he had.

“Hey there,” a familiar voice drawled honey-smooth over his shoulder. It was blissfully not aimed in his direction. He snatched his headset from its neat drape over his monitor and banded it over his head. “What’s your name?”

“Caspar,” Caspar twittered cheerfully. His voice faded into a brassy burble behind the dial tone ringing in Linhardt’s ear.

“_Hello_?” A creaky voice belonging to — his eyes darted back to his screen — Agatha Monroe picked up on the other end.

“...maybe get lunch together, show you the ropes?” Sylvain’s voice offered far away. Linhardt rolled his eyes and sighed and shoved his headset to dangle at his neck.

“No,” Linhardt interjected, kicking his chair sideways to squeak in Caspar’s direction. Sylvain glared at him from his smooth drape against Caspar’s desk. He looked pissed. Felix, lurking two desks away, seemed pleased.

“He’s having lunch with me,” he continued dully. Sylvain’s eyes narrowed with a very grumpy sort of disappointment.

“Oh, alright!” Caspar glanced between the two of them, his face still bright with a toothy smile. “Maybe tomorrow, then? Thanks, Sylvain!”

He looked to Linhardt again. There was something newly pink in his cheeks. He reminded him of those terrible little flat-faced dogs that had been so popular recently. His body kept up the look, thick-built as well — well, alright, _fit_ was the better word, and even if that button-down (still crimped at the center from its packaging, Linhardt noted drolly) was at least a size too small. Sylvain did always like the ones that seemed ready to start a fistfight, dumb or otherwise.

“That’s awfully nice of you,” Caspar prattled on. “But let it be my treat, alright?” Linhardt eyed him blankly and shrugged. It wasn’t as if he was going to eat anything. Not that Caspar knew that. But he could hardly tell him that Sylvain’s offer had been less an invitation to a noontime happy-hour than a one-way ticket to some dark alleyway.

Linhardt sighed and rolled towards his computer again. He didn’t ring back Agatha Monroe just yet. He clicked on his calendar instead, counting the months until the close of the fiscal year. Four, and four too many to ward off Sylvain’s stubborn advances — and not that he’d be the only one. Still, this Caspar seemed harmless enough, and if it meant keeping Hubert off his back for a while he supposed it was worth the effort.

His eyes darted furtively rightward again as his new neighbor settled himself in his seat.

Not that he wasn’t going to eat him.

He was definitely going to eat him.


	2. Hell is Other People — And Other Knock-Knock Jokes

There was a line in front of the hostess’ podium. Linhardt couldn’t possibly imagine the reason why. Sure, the restaurant shared the same bleak parking lot with most of the other businesses on this side of the highway — their own four-story building included, as well as the Lucky 277 Chinese Buffet, Dino’s Hi-Shine Dry Cleaning, and a dusty dollar store he was convinced was a front for something far more nefarious than off-brand super hero toys and lemon-scented cleaning supplies — but it was the sort of place that was built in three weeks using the same ingredients in the mortar that he suspected were microwaved into the meals.

He sighed and glanced up at the ceiling. It was strung, for some inexplicable reason, with canoes. There was a long tin advertisement for some carbonated beverage hung on the nearest wall, meant to look like it had stood sentry beside a sun-bleached desert highway for decades despite the fact that it must have been manufactured in the same assembly line as the rest of the miserable memorabilia cluttering the space.

“Hey there, fellas! Two for lunch?” The host — too pimple-cheeked and fresh-faced to call anyone _fella_ — grinned at them from behind his podium.

“Yes, please!” Caspar answered with the same blistering enthusiasm.

“Alright then, come on this way!”

There was no God. When you were a creature like Linhardt, you learned these sorts of things. Not that the idea of some bearded and conspicuously-Caucasian man living in the clouds was so outrageous — after all, he supposed he was quite peculiar himself, and he liked to imagine that he was on the more conservative end of the monster spectrum (not that he liked to be called a monster, of course, but we digress).

Still, no matter how many wondrous and terrifying beings there were hiding in the shadows of the unremarkable humans who called this place home, the fact was that when you died, you died. Not that this was a definitive end, of course: one simply had to look to Felix to understand that notion. But out of all of the various pick-your-own-adventure routes that spidered from one’s untimely demise, none of them ended under God nor Lucifer’s welcoming arms.

All the same, Linhardt was convinced that if there were a hell it would have been here — this sea of bloated salarymen blathering on about quotas and unsatisfying marriages, their breath sour from watered-down margaritas mixed in an orange bucket meant for home construction projects hidden in the kitchen, and all of them serenaded by sugar-sweet mid-nineties pop songs piped in from dusty speakers like Nero’s fiddle playing as Rome burned.

_Hell is other people_, Linhardt thought blithely — wasn’t there someone who had said that once? Had he eaten him, too? 

Caspar sat on the crinkling pleather of their booth and made a hungry noise as he flipped through the many pages of the plastic menu waiting for him. 

“Aw, right! They have double-decker bacon cheeseburgers!”

Linhardt’s stomach — well, it wasn’t his _stomach_, per say, but that soft spot where it should have been — flipped with each of his words.

“Delightful,” he muttered in reply. Linhardt decided that it was best not to touch his menu at all. Not that he could catch any of the communicable diseases no doubt smeared across the front in those oily fingerprints, but he did have his principles.

“I love this place,” Caspar droned on, rocking against his thighs as he glanced around the deliberately-dimmed room. “Look at all of this crazy stuff— look, there’s a stoplight!”

Linhardt stared morosely at the thing in question. It blinked green yellow red. The final color was accompanied by the sudden smell of sulfur and burning tires.

Fitting, really.

“Hey there fellas,” a cheery voice called out between the mumbling of their neighbors. It wasn’t that squeaking teenager who’d used those words on them before, but someone graced with a silky and decidedly feminine voice that somehow managed to linger in an arabesque in the air. “How are you all doing to...day?”

His eyes first settled on her breasts — supple, snowy-colored things only slightly squirreled away behind the red gingham of her shirt. He was reminded of the damsel from last night. If only it had been her there behind the screen instead. At least then the show would have been entertaining — the monster not meeting his end beneath the shining light of the sun but between her thighs as she neatly pulled his withered soul free from the confines of his chest.

_Chelsea_, her name tag read, adorned with glittery stickers shaped into hearts and stars. He snorted. She’d never been much of a Chelsea. Not that _Dorothea_ suited her much better, but he’d at least become accustomed to calling her by that name. And not that he ever sought her out, of course, but after one lived at least a thousand years one tended to remember the names of those who had also stuck around.

Her green eyes flittered between him and Caspar and him again. She smiled — an honest one, not the kind she had been wearing before. It was positively predatory.

“Great!” Caspar answered for the both of them. “How are you doing?”

“Fan_tas_tic,” Dorothea drawled. “What can I get you to drink, handsome?”

Caspar’s cheeks flushed red. It was becoming quickly apparent to Linhardt that he was not a good liar.

“A Coke?” Linhardt wasn’t certain why they all said it that way. Yes, he’d been privy to the phenomenon before — Coke or Pepsi was the question left unspoken — but it wasn’t like he’d ever said _Steve?_ and had been disappointed to receive a _Charlie_ instead.

“Sure thing, sugar. One Coke coming right up.” Dorothea winked at him before turning on her heel.

“Oh, geeze,” Caspar muttered after he’d torn his gaze from the curves of her ass. “She didn’t take your order. ‘M sorry.” He waved away the man’s apology with the roll of his eyes.

“Thanks again for inviting me out to lunch,” Caspar continued cheerily. “To be honest with you, I was running late this morning and forgot to pack anything to eat.”

“It’s alright,” Linhardt managed. “First days can be difficult.”

“First day?” Dorothea echoed the words as she suddenly reappeared, bending low against the table as she pushed a frosty glass in front of Caspar and left a benign cup of water behind for Linhardt as well.

It was thoughtful of her, really. Of all of the succubi he’d met, he supposed he liked her best — and she was full centuries, civilizations, _lightyears_ better than Sylvain. Not that it hurt that she generally preferred women when she went hunting, and that he generally preferred men. Still, it wasn’t unheard of for someone who craved steak dinners every night to occasionally order themselves duck l’orange when they were feeling adventurous.

Dorothea seemed to be of a similar state of mind. She smiled coquettishly at Caspar as he stared, red-faced again, at the tabletop.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, unexpectedly tongue-tied. Linhardt sighed.

“You must be some kind of movie star with those muscles of yours!”

“Oh, no,” he stuttered, waving his menu in the air like some white-colored flag. “Nothinglike that. It’s just some boring phone bank kind of thing.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind getting a call from you,” she countered sweetly. Caspar was turned into a flag: blue hair, the tomato-red blush, his white teeth flashing in an awkward smile. “Anyway, what is it that you’d like to eat?”

Caspar ordered his disaster of a burger. Dorothea jotted it down, winked again, disappeared. Maybe he would have flagged her back to insist she finally take Linhardt’s order, but he seemed bewitched by the heady perfume their waitress had left in her wake.

Well, not _seemed_. He _was_ bewitched. It was a whole thing.

“Caspar,” Linhardt sighed. “_Caspar_.”

“Huh? Yeah,” he laughed. “Yeah, sorry. I don’t know... what was I saying?” Honestly, Linhardt didn’t remember.

“You went to State, right?” Not that he cared, but he supposed this was this sort of thing one asked when they had a conversation. Caspar bobbed his head in an affirmative direction.

“Yeah. Class of nineteen!” He pumped his fists in the air, somehow seeming entirely earnest despite how absurd he looked. “I studied business. You would think that it would be easy to find a job in, you know, _businesses_ with that sort of thing. But it was really tough! I was really desperate until I found a posting for this place.” He glanced over guiltily at Linhardt. “Not that... Not that I’m saying that you’d need to be desperate to—”

“It’s a shithole,” Linhardt corrected him primly. Caspar gasped a laugh. “Are you from around here, then?”

“No, not originally.” Caspar swirled his straw around the circle of his glass. “I was born down south, actually. My family’s all still there. We aren’t really... Things got a little complicated.”

“I see,” Linhardt replied. It was the sort of thing one said when their conversation partner signaled that their topic was dark and heavy, the offering of an out so that they wouldn’t be forced to overshare. Those two simple words sailed over the blue bristle of Caspar’s hair to tangle in the plastic fronds of a palm tree propped against a far wall.

“My older brother is a cop,” he continued on determinedly. “My dad, too. It’s kind of a family thing. I wanted to do it too, but I couldn’t pass the exams. It really sucked.” Linhardt watched with bemusement as the man’s face grew transparent with his many fickle moods. It was impressive, really. “Then some stuff happened and...” He stopped to study Linhardt for a quiet moment, although not in a particularly furtive way. His eyes — blue like his hair, _honestly_ — darted from the tidy tuck of Linhardt’s long locks to the neat press of his dress shirt, the proper posture of his shoulders against the booth, the particular way in which he held his slender hands.

Linhardt knew that look. To be honest he was surprised to see him use it, what with how he’d been half-melted by Dorothea’s lazy charm.

“It’s the south, you know?” Caspar amended bashfully. “Anyway. A good friend of mine went to State and helped me get in. Not anything shady!” He waved his palms at him reassuringly. Linhardt cocked his brow at him as if it to say, _why in the hell would I care?_ “He’s a good guy. Let me live with him, even. Wouldn’t let me pay him for it, but I can’t live like that forever, right? So, thank God I got this job.”

“Hm,” Linhardt replied.

“What about you?” Caspar’s lips pursed around his straw as he took a gulping sip. “Are you from around here?”

“Not exactly.”

“How long have you been working at Sant-Blanc?” Linhardt lingered on the question for a moment. He wasn’t so very good with that sort of thing. Days were like minutes to him, naturally, and who could say the exact time that something so inconsequential happened? _At two twenty-seven in the afternoon I tied my shoe_, he thought, mildly amused.

“Almost two years,” he realized aloud. Caspar’s thick brows rose as he nodded at the sum.

“You must know how to do everything, then.” Linhardt smirked.

“There isn’t much to know.” That was the beauty of it, really. “You’ll do fine,” he elaborated afterwards, catching that nervous glimmer in the man’s eyes.

“Here you go!” Dorothea swooped between them again, this time balancing a plate against her palm.

“Thanks so much!” Caspar bleated happily. Dorothea offered him a cascading shower of giggles before nodding at them with a smiling _bon appetite_. She aimed her wink in Linhardt’s direction that time before waltzing away.

“Aw, cool!” Caspar spun his plate. “Look at that!” Linhardt felt the corner of his mouth twitch as he eyed the smiley face drawn in ketchup beneath Caspar’s greasy burger. Someone had drug a toothpick through the curve of its smile to mimic the shape of two fangs at either side.

Linhardt sighed. He fucking hated this place.

* * *

Linhardt broke two rules that day. They were as follows: 

** _1\. Do not hypnotize humans._ **

This one was a bit unique to him. Most vampires relied on that fancy little trick, but he wasn’t a fucking _charlatan_. His victims were lured into his bed because he was handsome, and charming, and good at sucking cock (and not that he was unaware of the lame pun hidden somewhere therein).

However, he was still drowsy from darling Erik and in an otherwise thoroughly annoyed mood when he’d spotted Dorothea’s number scrawled at the bottom of the receipt Caspar insisted on paying (_you didn’t even eat!_, he’d demanded, which was a difficult thing to contest), and although he was beginning to suspect that Caspar might have fallen for his charms as well as the stable of other men had before him, Linhardt, quite honestly, didn’t have the energy to bother.

“Give me that,” he snapped. “She didn’t give you anything.”

Caspar, doe-eyed, complied.

** _2\. Never stray into a human’s home._ **

This one was more of a universal suggestion, and the type that stemmed off poor decision making. It was easy to eat a person in the comfort of one’s own home, much in the same way that takeaway eaten with your own silverware leaves little left to surprise. Venturing out into the wild invited in all sorts of unexpected variables that became infinitely more complicated when you were a man-eater instead of someone simply craving Vietnamese (the food, not the people).

Linhardt respected this rule very much.

“Oh, shit,” Caspar had gasped as they made the trek back across the baked pavement of the lot bridging that horrible restaurant to their office complex. His cheery voice had dissolved into a gravely, dread-filled tone as he eyed a long line of texts scrawling over the face of his phone in increasingly large capital letters. “Do you have a car?”

This question had caught Linhardt off guard. If he hadn’t eaten Erik maybe he would have quickly replied _yes, of course, come with me_, and whisked him to his well-appointed Tudor-style townhouse to suck him dry.

But, as previously addressed, he had very much eaten Erik.

“Um,” he replied instead, “why?”

“My dog,” Caspar answered, already begging. “Apparently he’s been barking all day and the landlord is getting really angry. Shit. We’re not supposed to have dogs. Ashe is going to kill me.”

There was too much information there, and honestly he didn’t care about any of it.

“What does that have to do with my having a car?” Caspar’s brows arched into a hopeful shape.

“Do you think you could drive me over there? It isn’t far, but the bus fucking sucks. Sorry,” he amended afterwards, maybe because Linhardt looked surprised to hear him swear. He’d been nearly angelic otherwise. “I just need to calm him down. I just adopted him, he must be scared.”

Linhardt eyed him, unmoved and thoroughly unconvinced that “calm him down” would either be possible or quick.

“Please. I’m really sorry.”

_A pug_, he thought, and not for the first time; he was just like a pug, those poor, ill-bred things always snorting and huffing as they tried their best to survive. Linhardt had never been a dog person. 

“Fine,” he’d sighed, pivoting on his toes to seek out his car.

Still, it wasn’t like he was immune to change. After all, he’d lived for so goddamned long.

“Wow,” Caspar had gasped as they came upon his sedan. “Nice car.”

It was a very particular type of nice: clean, black, low mileage, and with an impeccable leather interior that still smelled rich and new. The car was perfectly mid-tier. Not cheap, naturally, but not flashy enough to wave a red flag so obviously in the face of the people he used it to ferry to their, well... doom.

“Where do you live?”

“In Gronder Acres,” Caspar offered as the car lurched smoothly forward. Linhardt nodded and pointed them in the appropriate direction. Caspar was unusually quiet. Nervous, Linhardt suspected. It was almost charming for the man to be worked up over such a trivial thing. After all, Linhardt generally was engaged in far more dire compromises.

Caspar hadn’t lied. Soon he was tasked with parallel parking his long car in a spot just large enough for it in front of a quaint four-plex originally built as a row home. Caspar winced as they stepped onto the sidewalk and were greeting by the booming barks of whatever dog was waiting for them inside.

It did not sound like a pug. That little petrified, unbeating muscle in Linhardt’s chest sunk. He hadn’t really planned for being mauled that day.

“Orlok,” Caspar cooed as they thudded down the hall. “Orlok, it’s okay.”

“_Orlok_?” Linhardt couldn’t help himself. What kind of fucking name was that?

“Yeah, you know, Count Orlok,” Caspar answered as if it were public knowledge — the sky is blue, that sort of thing. They came upon a door marked _3A_ and stood there as he hunted for his keys. “I’m kind of a horror movie buff. Have you ever seen _Nosferatu_?”

Part of him wanted to tell him that that insufferable movie had been derivative in its best parts. He didn’t have the chance. The door swung open into a modest apartment centered around a neat kitchen-_cum_-living room. Linhardt was at first impressed that it wasn’t some stinking sty.

“Orlok! What are you doing over there?”

Linhardt’s mild amusement transmogrified into an interesting mix of surprise and bewilderment and dread. Blissfully unaware, Caspar crouched and swung open his arms.

“Come here, Orlie. Stop barking. Everything’s alright.”

The great hulking beast slunk from behind a couch. It did so at first cheerily, its long tail wagging as its eye settled on Caspar’s broad smile. Once that golden orb had swapped to Linhardt, however, it sunk low into its haunches and began to growl.

“Awww, Orlok, no. It’s alright, he’s a friend. Come here.” Caspar glanced back over at him. “Don’t worry. He’s a big softie.”

“Caspar,” Linhardt offered in reply, not quite certain how to tune his voice. In that moment he realized that the man may have been, regrettably, as stupid as Hubert had warned. “That’s not a dog.”

“Huh?” 

“That’s a _wolf_, Caspar. Where the hell did it come from?”

Caspar’s cheeks flushed pink again as he glanced between Linhardt and the snarling creature.

It hadn’t been entirely true. Linhardt had left a few letters off from the word, much in the same way that he’d parried Sylvain’s invitation earlier with similarly white lies. The second and less important point was that the creature was certainly not named _Orlok_. In fact, Linhardt suspected that he — the so-called dog, not Caspar — was properly mortified by the name.

After all, they were supposed to be sworn enemies of those sharp-toothed creatures conjured by words like _Nosferatu_ and _Orlok_ and _Dracula_ and all the rest, wasn’t that right? Not that there was any more truth to _that_ than to the mortals’ insistence that Linhardt would sputter into a bonfire under the sun — or that Dimitri, as he was in fact named, was supposed to howl with fury as the moon somehow managed to transform him into a beast.

Funny, wasn’t it, how humans tried to explain everything they didn’t understand with some sort of mysterious power living in the sky?

Anyway, Dimitri was a werewolf, and werewolves were universally known to make poor house pets.

“Uh,” was all that Caspar could manage, reminding Linhardt again of why it was so important to keep up with his rules, “...what?”

Linhardt pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.


	3. Chocolate Cakes and Hand Jobs

When one celebrates their two-thousandth birthday, along with a very brightly lit cake they are formally given the right to become an insufferable know-it-all. This is because, for all intents and purposes, they are. The only exceptions to this rule are those poor fools bewitched into an infinite sleep or trapped in eternal punishment to roll some boulder up a hill or to be endlessly dripped upon with foul liquids like venom and metropolitan tap water; these souls are instead called “unlucky bastards,” and very rarely have the luxury of keeping themselves up to date on their history lessons while being otherwise indisposed.

Linhardt had, of course, enjoyed an uninterrupted string of luck in his own life largely bolstered by the fact that he’d simply eaten anyone who meant to kill him or otherwise leave him occupied— exhausting as that task was.

He drew on this great achievement of longevity to draft a few conclusions on his drive back to the office from Caspar’s modest apartment.

The first was this: werewolves were a primitive species in that they were both tribal and patriarchal. This was why he considered them no better than humans, really, although he recognized that it was perhaps an unfair prejudice (to whom, exactly, he wasn’t sure). No matter how he felt about it, the truth was that werewolves lived in stodgily hierarchical packs, and that these packs were always led by whichever fellow among them could bash in the most heads. It helped if they were clever, but this wasn’t necessarily a requirement.

Ergo, conclusion one: Dimitri might have been very strong, but he was a still stupid beast.

“Really,”’ Linhardt sniffed as he glanced over at him while he settled himself (man-shaped, this time, so that he didn’t scratch the _god-damned-leather-do-you-understand?_) in the passenger seat. “A car. You got hit by a _car_.”

“A truck,” Dimitri correctly glumly.

“You do realize that that’s even worse.” He supposed Dimitri probably narrowed that singular eye of his into a mean look at that, but he didn’t turn to hunt it out.

His second conclusion was as follows: while perhaps tender-hearted, dear Caspar von Bergliez did not seem to be much brighter than Dimitri.

“What were you doing there?”

“I’m sorry,” Linhardt replied in a high voice, “I was under the understanding that I was doing you a favor, Dimitri. It hardly seems right to be interrogated while I do.”

“Leave him alone, Hevring. He is a good man.”

“Why? Because he gave you a bath and invested in some top-shelf kibble?”

Dimitri suddenly lurched forward to grip the wheel. Linhardt rolled his eyes. He was like this, sometimes: hot-blooded and unpredictable. He’d liked him far more when he’d been a docile young man in whatever long-forgotten country it was that he’d been born in. Then again, that was so terribly long ago, and he’d learned in his own long two millennia past that people very rarely changed for the better.

“Come now, neither one of us is impervious to being flattened under a car.” He caught Dimitri’s fiery gaze with a bored look of his own. “I _know_ that you know that.”

“I owe him a great debt. He is under my protection.” Dimitri reluctantly released the wheel.

“Is he, now?” Linhardt wondered briefly if he’d pissed on his carpets to belabor the point. He certainly wouldn’t put it past him. “And here I was with the impression that you were a little short-staffed to toss around threats.”

Dimitri’s face darkened. His mood was becoming quite exhausting.

“I’m not going to hurt dear Mr. Bergliez,” Linhardt sighed. “In fact, quite the opposite. Cross my heart.”

“You don’t have a heart.”

“Well, I did _once_,” Linhardt pouted. “It must still be in there somewhere, although I’m not so eager to check.” He drummed his fingers on the wheel as they came to a stoplight. “Tell me again what happened.”

“What?” Dimitri frowned. “Why?”

“For my memoirs,” he drawled. Dimitri didn’t enjoy the joke. He sighed. The old monarchy had always been so dull. No wonder most of them had found themselves without a head. “I’ll have you know that I have already circumvented his untimely demise twice. I’m simply attempting to extend my heroic streak.” Dimitri snorted. Linhardt pressed the ball of his foot against the pedal as the light turned green.

“Do try to start up that big brain of yours, won’t you? By some sort of staggering luck Caspar found you on the side of the road last night steamrolled like a squirrel, is that right?”

“I’ve never feasted on vampire before,” Dimitri warned him darkly. Linhardt rolled his eyes.

“We taste terrible. It won’t be worth the bother. And so our friend rolled up his sleeves and carried you all of the way home, correct? And not once did he realize that you weren’t the standard labrador, or that somehow those broken legs of yours straightened out by the morning?”

“He... is perhaps somewhat naive,” Dimitri admitted quietly. Linhardt laughed.

“Perhaps.” He turned the car into a detour towards that tasteless, ticky-tacky estate that Dimitri and all of his mongrels called home.

“Twice,” Dimitri referenced in his retort, “you said that you saved him twice. What happened? From what?”

“Oh, what do you think?” The tall walls outside the Blaiddyd estate loomed into view. Linhardt wondered if the yard inside was full of princely droppings ready to be plucked up with a plastic bag gloved over some unlucky bastard’s hand. “From _whom_, of course, is the more proper question. But does it really matter? He’s just begging to be bewitched, and perhaps without an ounce of fat on him, the poor little fool. All he needs is a strip of bacon to become a properly delectable filet just waiting to be devoured.”

“It seems like you’ve given it some consideration,” Dimitri noted dryly.

“Unlike you, I have self control.” He brought the car to a lurching stop. “In any case, it seems as though Hubert thinks he’ll be Sant-Blanc’s next rising star. I am under very clear orders not to eat him, you’ll be happy to learn — Caspar, not Hubert, perish the thought.” He watched Dimitri unbuckle himself from his seat (still draped in that blanket he’d proffered for him from the trunk, and smelling slightly musty, just like the man himself) to then linger at the door.

“Are you trying to say that you’re watching over him?” Linhardt cocked a brow at him and was relieved that he had at least not said _when in the hell have you ever listened to Hubert before?_

“Hardly. Can you imagine the effort involved?” He inched the car forward to loosen Dimitri’s grip on the door. “But it’s not like I can maintain my reputation if someone snatches him up while he’s in my company.” He imagined that shape Dimitri had attempted with his lips was supposed to be a smile.

Ugh.

How annoying.

He toed the accelerator and didn’t look back to see if he’d missed that useless werewolf’s feet when he’d pealed away.

* * *

“Thank you _so much_,” Caspar breathed again. It was entirely unnecessary and moreover made redundant by the little lopsided cake he’d shoved into Linhardt’s hands when he’d dutifully arrived at his desk that morning.

_Thank :) you !!_, the cake proclaimed in shaky letters piped with icing nearly the same color as the young man’s hair. 

“I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t given me a ride yesterday,” Caspar continued as he draped that neon jacket of his over his chair and smoothed the wrinkled ends of his untucked shirt. “My landlord didn’t tell Ashe, thank God. After you left I vacuumed _everything_. It took forever! So. Much. Hair. But mission accomplished. He literally never would have let it down that I, um, brought a wolf home. Gosh. Thank you so much for covering with Mr. Vestra, too, by the way.”

Mr. Vestra. How disgusting. He must have been dancing in his grave to hear the words.

“Did you... _make_ this?” Linhardt stared uneasily at the cake. Caspar’s cheeks did their pink-roulette routine.

“Y-yeah! I mean, you really went out of your way yesterday. And with lunch, too! Anyway, I hope it’s alright. Ashe helped me with the recipe but he got bored halfway through.”

“Ashe?” There was that name again, said enough times, like some secret keyword, to finally force Linhardt to inquire more about whatever the hell an _Ashe_ was.

“My roommate,” Caspar illuminated as he typed in his password, scowled as it was rejected, attempted it twice more until it was properly spelled. “He’s a chef at this real fancy place downtown. Don’t tell him I said this, but I’m not a huge fan — too _molecular_ for somebody like me, you know? But he’s super good at baking. Not that he likes to admit it. I don’t know. He’s kind of weird.”

“I see.”

“It’s chocolate! Do you like chocolate?”

Linhardt wasn’t quite sure. It hadn’t been so en vogue when he’d still had taste buds.

“Yes.”

Caspar’s eyes settled on him, wide and sparkling and blue.

“Thank you, Caspar.”

Caspar’s chair creaked as he scooted inches closer. Linhardt’s eyes dropped to the plastic fork tucked neatly against the cake’s sloppily-iced sides.

_Oh_.

Time slowed as he plucked the fork from its spot. He watched the prongs sail through the air with dread, reminded of those pitchforks and torches which had once been the accessory of choice to chase him out of villages back in the good old days. None of that had ever been as intimidating as the tiny bite of dark sponge and white-and-blue icing he now carefully dissected from the cake.

Caspar watched with gleeful anticipation as the fork arced back towards Linhardt’s mouth.

As previously suggested, vampires don’t taste. There isn’t much need for it, after all (the reader is invited to sample a selection of blood to understand the reason). The more distressing aspect of this situation, however, is that when one is ushered into vampirehood there are parts of them beyond the tongue that become obsolete. Always interested in anatomy, Linhardt knew many of the specifics: the paramount takeaway of which was that most of his esophagus had no doubt been retired long ago, and everything it led to along with it.

He tried not to think too deeply, therefore, on just where that bite of so-called chocolate cake ventured once he’d chewed it and pushed it down his throat.

“Delicious,” he croaked as he set the cake aside. Caspar smiled, looking far more pleased than Linhardt had ever managed to feel in his director’s-extended-cut life.

* * *

Perhaps Caspar’s offering had poisoned him. Whatever the reason, he felt himself frustratingly distracted by the man later that day. Linhardt had managed two full phone calls before he’d deemed himself ready for a nap. When he’d woken from his crumpled pose over his keyboard, however, he’d glanced sideways to see Caspar still hovering over the binder of call scripts with the same lost stare he’d been using hours before. Linhardt’s eyes glanced to the man’s knees bouncing nervously beneath his desk. 

He waited to see if he would reach forward to click the link waiting for him on his screen to initiate one of the hundred-something calls he was being actively monitored to complete (Linhardt briefly imagined Hubert lurking in his industrial-carpeted lair, his bone-white face cast in the blue glow of his monitor as he watched a dashboard of the team’s metrics slowly tick forward across the day like some mad scientist doing something far more important, evil or otherwise).

Caspar turned a page, and frowned, and flipped it back again.

“...Caspar,” Linhardt sighed. The man jumped as he looked over in his direction.

“Yeah? Hey! What’s up?” Linhardt cursed his next words before they’d even managed to claw out from his breathless lungs.

“Are you alright?”

“Huh?” Caspar’s face turned a new red shade, this one nearly purple in its darkest parts. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just...” He crumpled a corner of the page and caught himself too late, cursing under his breath as he tried without success to flatten it again. “It’s kind of embarrassing, but I have, uh, dyslexia?” Linhardt wasn’t quite certain why he’d phrased it as a question, but he nodded just in case. “Like, when you jumble the letters in a word around? So it just takes me a while to...” he glanced down at the binder, looking suddenly daunting in its thickness and its many-colored dividers. His cheeks flared into another shade of red. “Not that I’m, like, illiterate or anything.”

“Of course.”

“Sorry. Do you think I’ll get in trouble?” He asked the second half of his question in a whisper that Linhardt might have missed if he wasn’t so good at hearing things. “I really need this job.”

“No,” he drawled, although it wasn’t necessarily the truth. “Don’t worry about it. Take your time.”

“Okay. Okay,” Caspar echoed, seemingly more for himself than anyone else. He nodded before turning back to puzzle over his scripts.

Linhardt straightened in his chair and forced his fingers over the caps of his keyboard. He minimized the list of calls that he was patently never going to complete to pull up a browser window. Next came a quick search and a download not technically approved by the corporate powers-that-be. He flipped open the binder at his elbow and, eyes steady on its pages, began to type across the whitewash of his word processor with a quick flitter of his long fingers.

Here’s the thing: Linhardt had been of the belief, and for many years, that humans were something like ants. They were dutiful and loved living together in great big swarms and, while they could ruin the occasional picnic, they’d never been that much of a bother.

Even then, he did have to allow them some concessions. Fine art, for one — after all, he wasn’t so much a brute himself as to not appreciate the occasional Rembrandt, nor the appropriate divine sonata to listen to while one made the rounds through hallowed museum halls.

Secondly, and although this was often overshadowed by their love of killing things (not unique to them, of course), humans sometimes were quite charmingly empathetic. After all, what sort of ant dedicated itself to inventing vaccines and building orphanages, and that sort of thing? Or, for that matter, he’d yet to meet an ant hunched over some computer station as it designed that strangely crooked font that was supposed to be easier for other ants to read when their eyes tended to shuffle their little ant-letters together.

Anyway. This was all a hypothetical. He’d always preferred hard facts. And they were as follows: it took him six hours to retype and print and hole-punch that uninspired drivel cataloguing the proper responses to questions about pre-existing conditions and co-pays and deductibles. By then Caspar had already made his exit with a cheery “good-bye, Linhardt!” as he ran off to catch his bus.

Linhardt left the refreshed binder at his new neighbor’s desk and tucked that cursed cake beneath his arm and wondered if Desdemona the cat would be interested in eating or if it would just kill her, too.

* * *

Six days later (which left 77 business days remaining until Hubert’s order not to eat Caspar expired), Linhardt discovered that the chain restaurant lurking in the shadows of their office building had been a purgatory. Hell, he was now convinced, was not there but here and now — a Friday-night team-building exercise hosted in the dingy acres of a bowling alley that had enjoyed its prime at least three decades prior when it was still acceptable to smoke in public and catcall women without being reprimanded. 

Hubert had dumped the full lot of them in there with a calendar invitation that made it quite clear that this “evening of fun” was quite obligatory. He’d also amended that the team was more than welcome to bring along family and friends to enjoy the bacchanal of lukewarm pizza and liters of flat soda. This had been, Linhardt knew well enough, a very deliberate ploy to invite along the bubbly red-headed fellow currently celebrating his third spare on lane six.

Ferdinand (Hubert had never formally introduced him, as if somehow Linhardt wouldn’t discover his ruse, but of course he knew his name and, quite frankly, far more than he’d ever wished to from always smelling his stinking cologne on Hubert’s cheap suits) was still dressed in the khaki and polo ensemble of his day job as a tennis... whatever. _Trainer_, Linhardt supposed, although he wasn’t certain just who among their suburban sprawl was supposed to be a rising tennis star. In a different context he would have probably served as a de-facto giggolo to disenchanted house wives, but woe-be-it to those poor Karens and Samanthas, for Ferdinand was clearly a dedicated pillow biter through and through.

And, for whatever positively blaspheming reason, somehow not entirely disgusted by Hubert’s poor excuse for charm.

“Can you believe that?” Sylvain muttered the question to him as they both lingered behind a tall shelf full of shiny bowling balls. “I thought for sure that guy was a goner last month. Do you think he’s going to turn him?”

The idea of an immortal, bloodsucking Ferdinand made Linhardt feel as close as he could muster to sick.

“He may try,” Linhardt admitted dryly, “although he will no doubt fail spectacularly.” It wasn’t like it was some easy feat — and a tidy form of population control that it wasn’t, he supposed. Sylvain turned up his nose.

“What happens if you _fail_?”

“It’s very messy,” is all that Linhardt revealed.

“Gross,” Felix offered from his perch on the shoe rental desk. The wraith’s grip tightened against a clip-board full of sign-in sheets so brusquely that he very nearly made it move. “Shit. What the hell is _she_ doing here?”

Linhardt followed his ghostly gaze to spot a blonde-haired woman across the long hall. He quickly recognized her as one of Dimitri’s nasty little lapdogs. He glanced back over at Felix and remembered that they were, in fact, all quite familiar with one another: born in the same dusty old kingdom, if he remembered correctly, although he’d doubt he’d even find a textbook that labeled it correctly now.

Maybe he would have been amused at whatever it was that had annoyed Felix, if not for the fact that the werewolf — Ingrid, that was her name, although it would have been better suited for some massive creature with braids and a horned helmet than her — was accompanied by the succubus formally-known-as-Dorothea.

“Honestly,” Linhardt sighed as he watched her face light up as she spotted her lost lunch from the week prior currently pumping his fists into the air to signal yet another strike. He heard Ferdinand groan as the screen hanging over their lane proclaimed Caspar as victor to their round. Part of him was convinced that it was Hubert’s responsibility to pluck the fellow from Dorothea’s grasp this time: after all, he was in _his_ sweetheart’s orbit, and none of them would have been there if Hubert hadn’t been so insistent that they _bond_.

Dorothea waltzed between the bunched groups of bowlers to hunt Caspar out. He smiled bashfully as she reintroduced herself, his eyes helplessly leveled at that spot where her false name tag had once hung before.

_Honestly_, he thought again as he stomped out from behind the shelves with another heavy sigh; he was utterly _hopeless_.

“Linhardt!” He was cut short by a sudden flash of golden hair. “What were you doing at the estate last week?” Ingrid planted her arms at her hips and stared hotly at him. Part of him wished to tell her that she looked far less intimidating in her pair of rented red-and-green striped shoes than she perhaps intended. She looked over his shoulder before he had the chance. “And I know that you’re over there, Sylvain!”

“Ingrid,” he greeted her blandly. “How lovely to see you. How many years has it been?”

“Four hundred and twelve,” she answered, clearly not amused. “Don’t change the subject. I know that His Majesty was injured just when you happened to reappear at our door. What did you do?”

“You know, sometimes I am mistaken for someone else, but never once before as a _truck_.” Her eyes narrowed.

“_What_?”

Of course he hadn’t told them. That would have been far too terribly convenient. Linhardt rubbed his temples.

“If you wouldn’t mind, I am a bit preoccupied at the moment—”

“Oh, you’ll be preoccupied when I tear that petrified heart of yours out from your chest!”

“Again with all of that,” he sighed. “Honestly, it’s probably quite overripe by now, so your work is nearly already done. Is that everything, then, or do you have any other threats prepared?”

She bristled and pursed her lips to continue, but he was distracted by the sight of Caspar’s blue head bobbing above the crowd. His heartbeat was slow and steady — not that he was _listening_ — so that could have only meant that he didn’t realize Dorothea was following in his wake like a shark. 

“Very good, Ingrid.” He ducked under her arm and sidestepped her gripping fingers to push into the crowd of his coworkers himself. He heard her grumble some exasperated sound before turning her temper on Sylvain (_And you!_, he could have sworn he heard her cry).

It appeared as though Caspar had been drawn in by the siren’s song of the hotdogs rolling limply over the nearby snack bar’s broiler. Linhardt steeled himself with another annoyed groan before jogging (_jogging!_) to intercept him mid-course.

“Yah!” Caspar cried out in surprise as he tugged him gracelessly towards a set of doors hidden behind a trio of bickering men dueling over the last slice of pepperoni pizza. Linhardt ignored him to shove him across the white-and-mint checkered tiles. _A bathroom._ Disgusting. His eyes lingered for a moment on the line of stained urinals. At least he’d picked the right one. Not that he was still required to do _that_ sort of thing, either, but perhaps Dorothea would be less willing to venture there amidst all of that crude graffiti and the bakery’s worth of stinking blue urinal cakes.

He pushed Caspar forward again as the door behind them swung open as if to cry, _oh-ho, Linhardt, you fool!_

He slotted the lock of their stolen stall tight and flipped his free hand over Caspar’s mouth. Footsteps echoed across the tiles outside — slow, measured, deliberate.

_What a fucking day_, Linhardt wanted to snarl. He tensed, instead, hoping that the very convincing glare he was pointing in Caspar’s direction would stop him from doing something as uncouth as biting his palm (not that those little flat teeth of his were very impressive, of course).

One of the taps squeaked open to splash against a sink. Linhardt listened as their assailant seemed to toy around in the stream.

“Alright,” a voice whispered thereafter, decidedly masculine, decidedly _not_ Dorothea. “Alright. Let’s go, Ferdie. You’re not some peasant, you’re _Ferdinand von Aegir_! And you are _important_! You are _smart_! And you are going to _win this next round_!”

If Linhardt had kept up with the habit of breathing he supposed he would have just realized he’d been holding his breath. Since he was _always_ holding his breath, however, he instead just rolled his eyes and let his hand fall from Caspar’s lips.

The door clattered as Ferdinand Von Aegir, adequately enthused, exited the dingy room.

“Sorr—” Linhardt began, only to be interrupted by the press of those same lips against his own. He gripped tightly at Caspar’s shoulders as the man made a good show of kissing him.

“What,” he hissed, bucking his head backwards, “are you _doing_?” Caspar stared back at him, eyes wide, cheeks pink (of course).

“Oh,” Caspar stuttered, “I just thought...” He glanced down at their bodies closely pressed together, Linhardt’s knee inexplicably jutting between his own. Linhardt could have been out in the parking lot, two streets away, maybe already all the way back home, and he still would have heard the hammering of Caspar’s heartbeat — quick and dancing when it had been so languid before.

Oh.

Right.

Well.

He cocked his leg experimentally higher to grind against the impressively proportioned tent currently being erected beneath the man’s fly. Caspar shuddered and made an objectively pleasing sound.

Well, it wasn’t like Linhardt to _waste_.

He nodded in agreement with his brief internal monologue, summoned a substantial amount of restraint, and planted a very benign kiss against Caspar’s throat before shoving his hands down the ridiculously-patterned front of the briefs peeking just above his belt.

It was perhaps not one of his best ideas, but it was at least quite satisfying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween, y’all! 
> 
> Thanks SO much for all of the reads/kudos/comments so far, I am SO thrilled that this has been entertaining for everyone so far because I am definitely on board with this ridiculous idea, now, too. 
> 
> Also, in case this wasn’t obvious, in this chapter Linhardt retypes all of Caspar’s scripts in the Dyslexie font (https://www.dyslexiefont.com/), because of course he does.


	4. Romeo, Romeo, u up?

_A Brief Overview of Incubi and Succubi   
_

_The incubus (female variant _succubus_) is a creature long documented by religious folklore that relies on human lust to ply its trade. While often described as bearing demonic features like serpentine tails or webbed wings, they are in fact indistinguishable from the men and women with whom they embed themselves. This is, of course, a feature as evolutionary in nature as the glowing bulb of an angler fish — after all, a human is far less likely to fuck something if it looks like some clearance-sale Halloween costume._

_Relatedly, they are one of the few members of the _familia monstrum_ that have an entirely spiritually-derived diet. While there are various methods to extract the spirit (or soul) of a human from their corporeal form, the most efficient approach is through sexual intercourse. Such activity allows for a clean and relatively straightforward harvest, and sources have been documented to say that it provides for a more satisfying meal much in the same way that a frightened heifer provides soured meat. The exact science of this process is not entirely clear, however additional research on the specifics is not suggested in the interest of the researcher’s own well-being._

_Much like the manner in which mankind has developed various methods to rank tuna destined for sushi rolls and to identify prime cuts of beef, incubi and succubi no doubt have a manner in which they prioritize their prey. One would extrapolate that it is related to the physical appearance of the men and women they hunt in addition to their general healthfulness._

From his own experience in that disgusting bowling alley bathroom a few weeks prior, Linhardt also had a theory that incubi and succubi both must have at some point been enrolled in some sort of training (and one can only imagine the curriculum) to sniff out generous endowments like dick-seeking truffle-hogs. And if this hypothesis were correct, he was going to have to hunt down his old dungeon blueprints to build a proper hide for Caspar to protect him from what could only be an incoming influx of interested suitors yet to add to Sylvain and Dorothea’s quite earnest attempts to unearth his _truffle_, too.

Such an idea was both perturbing and utterly exhausting.

The realization that he’d fallen into the habit of eating (“eating”) lunch with that same well-endowed individual every day was doubly perplexing.

“Are you sure you aren’t hungry?”

“No,” Linhardt sighed, keeping his eyes steady on his book. He heard Caspar stab his fork through a clump of spinach leaves and that ridiculous menagerie of toppings — nuts, cranberries, raisins, _craisins_, feta, tofu, sunflower seeds, and what he was relatively sure were miniature marshmallows stolen from the deserts — he’d added at the salad bar. “I’m not hungry,” he clarified tritely once he realized that he may have fallen trap to some double-negative.

Caspar’s chewing sounded unconvinced.

“Are you positive? I can spot you, you know.”

“That’s quite alright.”

“You’re really skinny, Lin.” Linhardt made a valiant effort not to roll his eyes. He was not _really skinny_; he was at a completely acceptable body fat ratio, thank you very much. Not that this was the response for which Caspar was so indelicately angling. _Concern_, that was what he was trying to convey, no matter that he did it in that gangly, clumsy way that he did most everything.

Linhardt’s nickname was incidentally overlooked, because he simply did not have the energy to address such an inane thing.

“I ate earlier. When you were in that meeting with Annette.” He glanced up from his book for good measure, willing his eyes into what he supposed was an honest-looking half-lidded shape before dropping them again.

“You always say stuff like that.”

“It seems that you may not need to ask the question, then.”

Caspar laughed, although he could tell that he was trying his hardest to maintain his empathetic look. Linhardt flipped a page and neatly ignored it, just like he’d been ignoring that horrible tingly feeling where his kidneys used to be that meant that he was in fact absolutely _famished_.

Here was the problem: Linhardt’s lunch breaks had been excellent scouting opportunities until Caspar suddenly became an anchor in them, filling each hour with rambling stories about Ashe and Ashe’s mysterious-friend-from-work-who-he-was-pretty-sure-he-was-sleeping-with-but-he-just-won’t-fess-up-about-it, and his latest acquisition of obscure horror movies on VHS that he really should come over and watch some time, and requests for updates on just how Orlok was doing at that wolf rescue (_as well as the family dog had done on that farm upstate_, Linhardt so desperately wished to quip before catching himself).

It hadn’t been a problem until last week, when the last bits of the now very-dearly-departed Erik had fizzled away from the dredges of his mysterious appetite. It was like clockwork, really — he could depend on the average meal to sate his hunger for approximately one month before he was bothered to repeat the whole complicated process of wining-dining-and-then-devouring again. And naturally he should have just popped into one of his preferred dive bars to scoop up his next meal, but that would have provided a full night-shaped window for Caspar to stumble into the clutches of some nasty creature (no doubt willingly and likely with a smile).

So he hadn’t, which was just another one of the stupid fucking decisions he’d made since Hubert’s stupid fucking request to watch over that hopeless call-center jockey, and maybe he was still fucking stupid enough to think that he gave a damn about what Hubert had said, as if it had nothing to do with the fact that Caspar was just so inexplicably _nice_ to him all of the time and had a cock that was owed its own full page in the Guinness Book of World Records.

_Fuck._

The fact that he had to focus so intensely on not eating Caspar and his miraculous dickwasn’t really the worst of it. He’d also been feeling a pull at the nape of his next for the past three days. This meant one thing, and one thing alone — Mother Dearest was calling for him. She never did this, because he’d told her not to in no uncertain terms, so he was hardly eager to discover the reason why she’d chosen now, of all times, to test him on it.

“Hey...are you okay?”

“Well, I don’t find this storyline terribly inspired,” he admitted as he fluttered the book in Caspar’s direction. “But honestly, I don’t know what I was expecting.” He eyed the bold, pedestrian typesetting on the cover, heralded on either side by acclaim such as _best-selling_ and _thrilling_, which really meant that it was chock-full of run-on sentences and not much else.

“Not that. You look a little... pale.”

“I always look pale,” he promised him dryly. Caspar frowned.

“Yeah, but you’re like, _extra_ pale today.”

“Thank you for your concern, Caspar, but I must insist that I am alright.” Caspar’s lips twitched into a little grin which he recognized too late as a look of victory.

“You’re lying. You always touch your left ear when you lie.” His fingers froze against the lobe of the aforementioned traitorous body part.

“I don’t,” he insisted haughtily. Caspar laughed.

“And then your eyebrows do that _exact_ little twitchy thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he contended as he scrubbed his hands over his face and briefly wished he’d been graced with shapeshifting abilities instead of his exceptional skill in whatever it was he did.

Drinking blood. That’s right.

Was that even a skill?

He pressed his fingers against his eyelids and wondered briefly why, of all of the various functions his body had shuttered over the years, they still sparkled with stars when he rubbed them that way.

“Maybe you should go home early,” Caspar suggested in a softer tone. “I mean, it’s not like anyone would notice. Mr. Vestra still hasn’t come in.”

That was the other thing he was supposed to be worried about — well, not _worried_, but perhaps at least _cognizant_ of. Hubert had been suspiciously absent from his miserable little office for over a week. This sometimes happened when he was feeling particularly mopey, but he’d been smelling even more like that ridiculous little ball-boy of his than usual before he’d disappeared, so unless he’d accidentally slipped a tooth sucking him off Linhardt wasn’t so sure just what it was he was sulking about. Perhaps he’d mis-laundered his collection of frill-collared white shirts.

Linhardt sighed and pushed his hands sideways to knead at his temples. That pull became more insistent than ever at his nape, as if Desdemona had planted some of her claws there to insist the _nice_ canned kitty chow for once (oh, but as if he ever offered her any less).

“Fine,” he groaned. To whom, he wasn’t so certain. It didn’t really matter. It wouldn’t change where he was headed next. Maybe Edelgard simply meant to kill him, having grown tired of his infamous refusal to ever play along, that old witch (and not the good kind). About goddamned time.

He heard Caspar sigh in reply.

Caspar’s sighs weren’t like his — weren’t full of cynical bemusement or annoyance but relief, sometimes pleasure, deep and a little rasping and _why the hell was he thinking about that?_

“Alright,” he continued in a mutter. “I’ll go home early.”

“Text me if you need anything, alright?” Caspar smiled at him in a way that made it seem like he’d never done a disingenuous thing in his entire blue-raspberry-flavored life.

_Text me if you need anything_, Linhardt thought again later as he took a seat in the airy parlor that Edelgard liked to use as some sort of anxiety-inducing waiting room. He briefly glanced, unimpressed, at the line of suits-of-arms leaning empty and foreboding against the far wall. Just where was it that she bought all of this shit, anyways? Or had she really been hoarding it all away in some old world storage unit somewhere, just waiting for the right opportunity to decorate this newest oversized hidey-hole?

He fished his phone from his pocket before he fell into a hapless staring contest with the closest suit. His thumb skimmed across the screen as he pulled up his text history. It was full of flagged conversations he’d never deigned to read. It seemed as though Edelgard had now provided him with the opportunity to catch up, and no fucking matter that _she’d_ been the one who’d been so eager to summon him there, that insufferable... 

He tapped a thread titled _Sylvain J. G._

_Hey,_ it read in a cheery green bubble, followed under by: 

_you up_

_?_

The date below the bubble changed as he began to scroll.

_Hey_

_Yo_

_Drinks?_

_Hey asshole_

_u up_

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he sighed, an epithet he usually avoided when he wasn’t so blisteringly hungry. Linhardt backed out of the window and clicked on the next line entitled _Hubert DoNotAnswer_:

_Linhardt_, the first aptly-unanswered bubble began, _can you please call me?_

_I can hear your phone buzzing, I know this message was received. _

_Contact me at your earliest convenience._

_I must remind you that you are obligated to assis—_

Linhardt tapped out of this window as well, infinitely less willing to be harangued by the text-version of Hubert than by the one made out of flesh and bone and cobwebs and hair pomade. He scrolled up to the top of the list and lingered there before reluctantly tapping on _CASPAR [bee emoticon]_ (the namesake of which, one may have noticed, had entered in his contact information himself).

_GM !!_

**_?_** , a blue bubble had replied.

_Good morning !_

** _Good morning, Caspar._ **

_HUHAGD!_

** _?_ **

_Hope u ha ve a great day!_

_**You** **as well.**_

He scrolled further down the list. 

_Chinese ulnch?_

** _Ok._ **

_:)_

Further still. 

_[an image of a stack of DVDs is attached; at the top, a cover featuring a screaming face and an illegible title spelled out in bloody letters is visible]_

_jackpot!!!! hve u seen EVIL DEAD ? >:)_

** _No._ **

_we can watch 2moro nite?_

**Ok.**

_>:) >:)_

_u left ur sewater_

_[an image of a navy sweater is attached, draped over the arm of what appears to be a couch]_

_[an explicit image is attached]_

_:*_

“Linhardt.” 

Ladislava looked mutually displeased to see him. He quickly pocketed his phone and stood. She gave him a look that seemed to contend _can you really not survive an afternoon without something phallic to look at it_, but she didn’t say a word of it because she was, of course, much younger than he was. They all so did love their rules in this house of Hresvelg — the bloody fools.

“Let’s get on with it, then,” he conceded with a sigh. She nodded and dipped slightly at the shoulders before turning to lead him down a nearby hall. His eyes drifted along the positively uninspired paintings on the wall — Edelgard on a horse and scowling, Edelgard on a very elaborate chair and sneering, Edelgard in some imaginary study filled with metaphorical accessories like globes and birds and scepters, and with her face pinched into a shape like she’d just realized she’d strode in dog shit moments before.

Well, he supposed this was what it was like when one visited with their mother: a house full of embarrassing pictures and one’s stomach full of some nameless anxiety as they prayed that she didn’t bring up anything political or grandchild-adjacent. Not that those pictures were generally of the woman herself, of course, or that politics for her meant her own absolute world domination but, well, Edelgard had always been unique.

Ladislava shouldered open a door that squealed on its hinges with just the right amount of dramatic zeal.

“Father!”

He wished, suddenly and rather desperately, that at least one of the humans’ strange predictions about his kind had been correct, and that he could have transmogrified himself into a bat in that very moment and fluttered away. His mind was filled with images of the little furry creatures. Perhaps he just hadn’t focused hard enough on it before. Leathery wings, little beady eyes — wait, what did their feet look like? Did they even have feet?

He remained frustratingly man-shaped as the woman who had cried out at him swept forward with gripping arms.

“Bernadetta,” he begged her thinly, “please don’t call me that.” He had directed those very same words at her six hundred and thirty-three times. They did not seem any more convincing now, regrettably. She did at least release him after another squeeze of her slender arms, her head tipped upwards as she smiled fondly at him. The curving line of this expression was accentuated with two sharp canines.

_Ugh._

They always did this when they all got together — and this thought he had in tandem with the dreadful realization that the room was filled with them: Petra, Randolph, Fleche, Lysisthea, and that sulking little shadow must have been Hubert — showing off their fangs like high school boys swinging their dicks at each other in a locker room.

Edelgard’s damned brood, at one time frightening but now somewhat sad. He supposed it had something to do with the suburban setting of their newest den. Edelgard had always been going on and on about the supremacy of their species and how she’d secure it forevermore with the subjugation of the creatures that both hunted them and constituted their singular diet. He wasn’t so convinced she was doing a terribly good job at it if she’d relegated herself to this horrible faux castle planted on the premiere cul-de-sac of a housing development that featured not one but four playgrounds.

This thought was one digression from the current task at hand. The second was that Bernadetta, as so indelicately announced aloud, was not really Edelgard’s hell-spawn but _his_.

There was an explanation for this, of course, and he thought it was a very good one, even if he was currently regretting it.

He’d met Bernadetta five hundred and six years earlier, and in a castle that had a far better pedigree than the pitiful one he was standing in now. She had been the daughter of a count who, like most other members of the peerage, was an absolutely horrendous man. To say he’d treated her cruelly would have been an understatement, and even to Linhardt, who made a habit out of killing at a very large scale. She’d been a timid, cringing creature when he’d first met her, himself thinly disguised as something vaguely noble as he made an admirable effort to eat the entirety of her household staff.

Despite the fact that she was always squealing and stuttering when he trapped her into a conversation (and let us again be reminded that she was frightened of him as a nobleman and not as a bloodsucker, which was quite the reversal for him), he’d been impressed by her tidy hand at painting. When he’d stumbled upon her writings his little leathery heart had nearly beat again.

As previously discussed, he was a bit of a softie for the arts.

It had been more difficult to ignore her father’s mistreatment of her after he’d discovered that she was actually quite clever. However, the sixteenth century was not one known for its generous treatment of women, so it wasn’t like he could simply sweep her away from her father’s domain and wish her well on her next adventure. After a particularly disastrous ball (during which her father found her less than coquettish as he tried to ply her off on an up-and-coming merchant) left her covered in bruises, Linhardt reluctantly decided to turn her.

He did so in a perfectly diplomatic way. _Bernadetta_, he’d asked the Bernadetta-shaped lump cowering beneath her covers in the room he’d spirited himself into one dark and dreary night, _would you find it difficult to kill a man?_

_K-kill_, she’d stuttered in a squeaking soprano. _W-what sort of m-m-man?_

This had been a promising response. He’d told her that it could be any sort of man, and that there were plenty of them who very well deserved it. This had resonated with her enough to peek her nose outside the protection of her sheets.

The life immortal had changed Bernadetta in ways he hadn’t quite predicted. Once she’d come to realize that it wasn’t so easy for people to hurt her anymore she’d started to conquer her stutter. The rest fell in place in the years that came after until she’d been transformed into a confident and sometimes even mischievous creature of the night.

While this whole undertaking would have generally been unthinkably complicated for someone like Linhardt, he had at least been rewarded with the extensive library she’d written in the five hundred years that had followed that stormy night when she’d been reborn. Her various nome de plumes had become legends in a variety of genres, and he’d been secretly charmed that all of them had in their acknowledgments, beneath whatever contemporary companion she’d made, a little line that said _for L._

Anyway. It was all very heartwarming, but he wasn’t really in the mood to reminisce that afternoon.

“What do you want, Edelgard?” He spat the question in the direction of that pale shape lurking theatrically atop a throne-ish chair at the center of the room. A quiver passed between the shoulders of the other men and women she’d made at the thought of his flat-toned impropriety. He refused to acknowledge it, just like he refused the overstuffed settee that Bernadetta had steered him toward.

“So kind of you to come, Linhardt,” Edelgard drawled. “Might I request that you do so more expediently in the future? We have been waiting for some time.”

“Have you?” The words didn’t come out as much of a question. Edelgard borrowed one of those scowls from the hallway gallery before flicking her hand in the direction of the semi-circle of monsters arranged at her feet.

“Not to say that I don’t appreciate your pragmatism. Here, then, is why I have called you here. It seems that your brother has found himself in quite the predicament.” Her pale fingers fanned in Hubert’s direction. “He has come to his family for support. I, of course, expect you all to oblige him. I believe that you in particular will be able to help settle it.”

_Brother. Family_. If she wasn’t careful they’d lose their status as coven to become a lowly cult. He supposed they really were only a few matching robes away from the designation.

“Is that right?” Hubert returned his glare with an interesting mix of disgust and desperation. It made him look even more like a deranged snake than usual. “And what on earth could I help with that these idiots can’t manage alone?” Fleche harrumphed with agitation at his name-calling. Edelgard’s eyes settled on Bernadetta at his side. He felt her stiffen with pride at having been singled out.

_Oh, for fuck’s sake._

“What did you do?” The naked lumps of Hubert’s brows stitched together in what Linhardt could only assume was a guilty look.

“He won’t eat,” is what Hubert sulkily replied. “And he... refuses to speak to me.”

_Ferdinand_, Linhardt realized along with a heavy dose of beleaguered dread. This was going to take so much goddamned time and effort. He wouldn’t have offered either to Hubert even if he’d actually _liked_ him.

“I did everything to the proper measure,” Hubert continued defensively. “It was perfectly done.”

“Apparently not,” Linhardt sniffed in reply.

“I would like you all to properly welcome your new brother and help him assimilate.” Edelgard’s stony tone made it clear that it wasn’t a request. “I’ve prepared a retreat for you. Ladislava will see to ensuring that it is properly stocked. Please speak with her if you have any requests.” Her eyes settled on Linhardt again. “Be prepared to remain there until our Ferdinand is more... _at ease_.”

Linhardt measured the misery of obeying Edelgard’s order against the punishment owed from telling her to kiss his ass. The former eventually won favorability, although solely because she was likely the only creature in the world (or at least in that subdivision) who could chain him in a basement and force him to eat his own fingers and toes.

“Fine,” he submitted between the grit of his teeth. He turned and stalked back through the door before he had the chance to see if Hubert’s look of appreciation was any less constipated than his usual comic-book-villain sneer. 

* * *

His phone was chiming incessantly by the time he’d escaped Edelgard’s lair and had hunted down his car again. Linhardt sunk into the driver’s seat and slipped it from his pocket with another belabored sigh. 

_CASPAR [bee emoticon]_, the phone’s screen insisted with a pulsing flash. He reluctantly tapped the side of his thumb against the colorful shape.

_hey!_

_u ok?_

_lin_

_r u still aliev?_

_:(_

Linhardt ground the butt of his palm against his eyes.

**_Yes_**, he tapped out quickly. His fingers hovered over his phone for a moment before he added **_I was just sleeping._**

_hey!_

_how r u feeling_

** _Fine. Thank you for asking._ **

_of course!_

_do you wnt me 2 bring you idnner?_

Linhardt wondered briefly if Caspar would ever stop trying to feed him.

**_No, thank you_**.

_:(_

He glanced between the phone and the wrought iron that caged in Edelgard’s meticulously kept yard. So tacky.

**_I’m going to be going out of town for a while_**, his fingers quickly dashed out.

_oh?_

_vacay?_

Linhardt smirked.

** _Celebrating a friend’s birthday._ **

_ooh_

_can i come?_

He snorted. Perhaps Caspar had been a bit too emboldened by Hubert’s absence.

** _No._ **

_:( :( :( :(_

Linhardt tossed the phone into his lap and slotted his keys into the ignition. He ignored Caspar’s chiming for six blocks before he was stopped by a red light. Mildly curious, he reached down to thumb through the man’s pouting responses.

_syvlain says i can come_

_>:)_

“What the fuck,” he muttered, brow raised. He flipped through a quick series of windows and tapped on the name of the man in question. Someone honked behind him as the light turned green. He briefly considered eating them before lurching his car forward.

“Hey, Lin!” Sylvain’s unconscionably cheery voice burbled into his ear. “What’s up, man?”

“I told you to stay away from Caspar,” he snapped as he pinched the phone against his shoulder with the bend of his jaw. Sylvain’s voice laughed.

“You are so adorable when you’re jealous.”

“What the fuck,” he insisted again.

“Relax. When have I not listened to you? It’s almost like you don’t think we’re friends.”

“Sylvain.”

“Linda,” Sylvain drawled. “Calm down, alright?” _I am calm_, he wanted to contend, but of course that wouldn’t do much for his position. “If you must know, I’m nowhere near your precious little hedgehog. Actually, want to come out? I’m going to—”

“What did you tell him?” Sylvain snorted another huff of laughter against his far-away receiver. “Are you... _texting_ him?”

“Listen, it’s not my fault that I give out great advice. By the way, are you alright? You’re usually not this bitchy.” Linhardt sucked in a deep breath. Sylvain must have heard it because he laughed again. “Hubie, right? What a fucking mess _that_ is. I totally called it, right?”

“How do you know about that?”

“What? Are you kidding? Did he really not tell you?” It was Sylvain’s turn to sigh. “I’ve been at his apartment for like four fucking days trying to get that blushing bride of his out of his room. It’s been a total nightmare.”

“_You_? Why?”

“Because I’m a nice guy.”

“Ah-huh.”

“Come on, Linnie, don’t try to deny it.” A sudden realization made Linhardt’s jaw grip tight.

“Don’t tell me,” he groaned, “that you’re coming, too.”

“Of course I am!” Linhardt sunk against the soft leather of his seat as Sylvain scoffed into the phone. “It wouldn’t be right to have a party without me. That was cute, by the way — _birthday party_. Loved it. Is that a pun? I don’t what you call it, but whatever it is, nice touch.”

“Caspar is not going to...” Linhardt nudged the wheel with his knees as his free hand rubbed at the bridge of his nose. _A den of vampires_ is what he left unsaid, and it wasn’t important that he was one of them, too.

“Of _course_ he is,” Sylvain insisted sweetly. “Ferdie loves him. They go to the same gym. Did you know that? He’ll be so happy to see him. Look,” he added, his voice dipping into something that almost sounded sincere, “Hubert really fucked this up. I don’t think Ferdinand is quite, uh, vampire material.” Of course he wasn’t, he was a fucking _tennis instructor_. Fucking hell. “Do you really think throwing more bloodsuckers at him is the right idea? Like, one look at Ladislava and he’ll probably just stake himself.”

“This is a terrible idea.”

“I think it’s going to be great. It’s a ski lodge, did you know that? My ass looks so good in ski pants. You are going to lose your mind.”

“I doubt it.”

Linhardt tipped his phone from his cheek. It had been buzzing since Sylvain had mentioned Ladislava.

_see u soon :*_ , a text from _CASPAR [bee emoticon]_ read. A second bubble popped across the screen as he read it over. It featured the man in question wearing nothing but a pair of ski goggles and a smile.

“Fucking hell,” Linhardt sighed. Sylvain interpreted the words as something positive, of course, and cheered from the depths of whatever fiery brimstone place it was that he called home. 


	5. Interlude I — Darling, You Simply Possess Me

“How about her?”

Felix’s eyes settled on the young woman Sylvain had pointed out just as she smacked the copier. The machine rattled and beeped with indignation. The woman groaned and mashed its buttons. Out shot a crumpled sheet of paper from one of the trays. She reached for it just as it was sucked back in, this time accompanied by a shrill noise that was probably copier for _fuck you!_

“Oh my fucking god,” the woman brokenly whispered. 

This had been going on for some time.

Felix scowled, utterly exhausted by the sheer number of breasts that had been offered up to him in this little game they played. He was half convinced that Sylvain did it simply to annoy him. Well, no; if that was his aim it was absolutely one-hundred percent intentional, the little shit.

The woman — an intern, no doubt, this obvious in the fact that she’d paired her office-appropriate black skirt and fuchsia blouse with a tacky plastic choker — stood straight, glanced side to side, hugged her arms. She muttered under her breath to laugh away that eerie feeling of being watched before continuing on in her hopeless rage-against-the-machine.

“You’re joking,” is all Felix offered in reply. Sylvain sighed and rolled his eyes with the same amount of theatrics owed to an entire Juilliard graduating class, but in his crooked pout Felix could read his amusement clearly. They’d been together for so long that perhaps this could have been misinterpreted as his familiarity with the man — a deep, fond understanding of all of his quirks and tics.

This was not the case. Not the first part, they’d definitely been together for an inordinate amount of time — enough that he’d lost track, honestly, which was a little embarrassing — but more the second. Sylvain wasn’t an enigma, some cryptic codex begging to be solved by spectacled archaeologists or Nicholas Cage or perhaps a spectacled Nicholas Cage. He was a picture book: ten pages, no more, with one-to-two-syllable words all arranged to proffer up some ham-fisted message like _wash your hands_ or _don’t eat rocks_.

“You are way too picky,” Sylvain contended as they looped back into the main office. His lips didn’t move when he spoke. Instead his voice rung in Felix’s head, some sort of incubus trick that would have been far more impressive if Felix hadn’t outshined him with that whole business of resurrecting himself.

“Just how many men with long black hair do you think live out here? And listen, let me be the one to tell you that the ones who _do_ won’t exactly meet your standards. Way too much self loathing, even for someone like you.”

“They don’t have to — I’m not explaining this to you again.”

“Aw, come on,” Sylvain drawled, fluttering his lashes at him. ”Please do. You know I love it when you get all moody.” Felix crossed his arms over his chest, realized too late that he’d done exactly as Sylvain had asked, threw them back at his sides with an irritated huff.

“It’s not like you pull on a dress in the morning,” he mumbled in some half-baked metaphor.

“I mean, not recently, but not for lack of trying.”

He really should have predicted that response.

“I don’t — I want to have a _dick_!” Sylvain grinned.

“Yes, darling, I know.”

“Not like that!” Felix fought the urge to crack his knuckles against that stupid grin. Not because it would have been rude, just that it wouldn’t have made any difference, which was the whole fucking reason they were doing any of this to begin with, and of course Sylvain had to make it absolutely im-fucking-possible, as if this wasn’t all his fault.

He scanned the floor of dull-eyed office workers. _No_, he thought as his eyes darted from one hunched-over figure to the next; _no, absolutely not, no, what-a-joke, no_. His gaze settled finally on a man deeply involved with the task of building a paperclip chain. He was a little short for Felix’s taste (not that he’d ever shared this preference with Sylvain, no doubt to avoid him making some joke about _overcompensating_) but his shoulders were broad-set and seemed to have some element of fitness to them.

Good enough.

“There,” he told him flatly, pointing out his charge. Sylvain considered the arrangement with a thoughtful-sounding hum.

“I don’t know, Fe. He seems a little bit too _don’t-tread-on-me_ to play ball.” Sylvain waggled his eyebrows suggestively. Felix offered him a withering stare in return.

“You’re an incubus,” he reminded him. Sylvain nodded.

“I am.”

“A sex demon.”

“Yes, I like that version even better.”

“You don’t need to explain the finer points of the gay agenda to him, Sylvain. Just fucking do it already.” Sylvain laughed.

“My, eager today, aren’t we?”

“I’m leaving,” Felix snarled, already sinking into the ground.

“Okay! Okay!” Sylvain waved at him defeatedly just as his waist began to disappear beneath the sea of coffee-stained carpet. “Dealer’s choice. I get it. Come on then, kitten.”

“I’m going to fucking kill you.”

“It’s not like I would mind,” Sylvain teased him as he strolled forward. “Even better if we could do both.”

* * *

“I’ve never done this before,” Eddie admitted nervously as Sylvain locked them into the singular stall of the office’s family friendly restroom. This was, by the way, a very interesting offering for a workplace setting — after all, it wasn’t like there were so many strollers making the rounds between all of the cubicles upstairs. Of course, it had been his idea to partition the space to begin with and Hubert the master of its implementation, himself quite partial to the idea of eating on the job even if he was always so whinging about it.

Honestly, what had Sylvain ever done in his long-drawn life that wasn’t utterly brilliant in every regard? 

“That’s alright,” Sylvain reassured him as he began to unbutton his shirt. “I have.” Eddie laughed in a drunken sort of way.

“You’re really hot.”

Felix glared at him over Eddie’s shoulder. Even after all of this time, that scowl of his was _delectable_. Sylvain smiled and brushed his fingers around Eddie’s cheeks and into his short-cropped hair.

“How sweet of you to notice,” Sylvain drawled. Eddie watched with half-lidded eyes as he leaned closer. The man’s lips had already parted for that kiss he was theoretically not at all interested in when Sylvain glanced sideways again to insist, “listen, it’s not like I made him say that. Stop giving me that look.”

Eddie’s brows crumpled with confusion. A moment later they drew together into a proper wincing shape. Sylvain held him steady as Felix did whatever it was that he did to draw on a man like a set of pajamas.

When they’d first started at this whole game it had taken him ages to get it right. Very few people welcome a possession, after all. Often Sylvain had been forced to chase after their victim over and over again as Felix did his best to step inside, and them becoming more hysterical at every turn. The good news was that there was at least very little of the projectile vomiting involved that had been so popular with movies on the subject, and positively no spinning heads at all.

Still, Sylvain had been poked in the eyes more times than he could count, so it was a blessing that Felix had improved with time.

“There you are,” he purred as he watched Eddie’s blue-green eyes darken into a honey-brown. They were matched soon after by Felix’s trademarked glower.

“Ugh,” Felix’s voice complained. “What did he do, eat an entire onion for lunch?”

“You are _impossible_.” Sylvain continued on in his task of removing Eddie’s shirt. Felix huffed to signal his eternal discontentment. He’d also started to trail his — well, Eddie’s — hands over Sylvain’s sides. Sylvain certainly appreciated the attention, but it did make him feel a little sad. When Felix had been a man he’d been like a cat caught in a rainstorm to court: bitter, snarling, always an arm’s distance away even when Sylvain was quite certain he was entirely enamored.

Honestly, the whole situation had been terribly complicated. Sylvain had never met a man he’d actually _loved_ before, and he’d been convinced that Felix had been of the same general mind. When a good snog sucked the soul out of your partner, moreover, it made love quite a tricky thing. And of course it hadn’t been as if he could’ve simply explained the arrangement to Felix, and not even if the little barbarian had been open-minded (which of course he hadn’t been, aside for a few key things involving male body parts).

But Sylvain was built of ninety percent lust and a minor dose of hopeless romanticism, so naturally he’d eventually been hypnotized by Felix’s dourness and perfect ass (and yes, he was aware of the irony). It had taken him nearly sixty years to apologize for the misstep of jumping into his bed, and even then he’d still been cursed with Felix’s haunting forevermore.

Which wasn’t a problem. Honestly, it had been a particularly tidy solution. But it did make him feel a little guilty that Felix had softened from a proper villain into a charming curmudgeon over the years, and doubly so that he was so desperately _touchy_ now — no doubt having something to do with the fact that he usually was nothing more than a handsomely-arranged puff of air.

Still. Nobody was perfect.

“Damn, Eddie,” Sylvain said with a whistle as he finished with the shirt and groped downwards beneath the crackled pleather of the man’s belt. “You know, this almost seems like a waste of a perfectly g—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” Felix’s haughty tone was betrayed by the way he’d rearranged Eddie’s eyebrows into a delightfully desperate shape.

“Sweetheart,” Sylvain teased, his lips brushing against the man’s throat. “Don’t be jealous. You know I only have eyes for you.”

“Shut up.”

“I won’t.” He nibbled on his ear. “What if you forget how much I love you?”

“That’s so fucking lame.” Felix didn’t sound terribly convincing. He’d always been a sucker for sweet nothings, really.

“Say, let’s keep him on for a while, shall we?” He tugged Eddie’s khakis to the ground. “It’s been so long since last time.”

“It’s been three days,” Felix corrected him dryly as he shifted his hands lower to finger the button of Sylvain’s fly.

“You know,” Sylvain countered as he yanked his shirt over his head, “I was watching the television earlier, and this positively delightful little woman said that an active sex life is very important in long-term relationships.”

“I don’t think this is what she had in mind.”

“She said that after sixty, sometimes pillows can be helpful,” Sylvain told him matter of factly as he kicked off his shoes. “Would you like a pillow, darling?”

“You are so fucking stupid.” Felix pushed forward from the creaking door to kiss him. Sylvain enjoyed the gesture, onions aside.

“Mmm,” Sylvain agreed. “Tell me what else you think about me.” Eddie’s cheeks blushed, which was a beautiful thing even on someone as plain-looking as him.

“I dunno,” Felix mumbled self-consciously as Sylvain knelt to his knees. Sylvain laughed and danced his fingers over his — well, Eddie’s, let’s say _the_ — thighs.

“Come on. You’re not the only one who’s desperate.” Felix pulled on his hair for that one, which he supposed that he deserved. He leaned forward to tease out his answer with his mouth instead of his words.

“Fuck,” Felix moaned. “Fine. I fucking love you, you stupid fucking idiot. Happy?”

_Very happy_, Sylvain agreed, using that little trick of his again given that his mouth was otherwise occupied. Soon enough he’d have to start thinking about logistics again — where to put Eddie, most importantly, once he’d been properly parted with his soul; maybe Hubert would be interested in eating him, what with Linhardt being so stubborn lately with whatever the hell he was up to — but in that moment, at least, he was simply pleased to be pleased.

And so it wasn’t so bad, really, to be a devil haunted by a ghost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. 
> 
> Please accept this silly little side story alongside my deepest apologies for totally screwing up my update schedule by starting to write another sad-face serious fic. I know it’s been awhile since the last chapter, but I am still very much invested in this story and more is coming soon! 
> 
> Somewhat relatedly, I have been planning on including these little interludes for more minor background pairings, since I think this whole monster thing is just too fun to not share all around. I’ll be calling all of these “interludes,” so if you are just here for the Casphardt/Ferdibert (and aren’t those just the most hilariously gross ship names ever, I die) I hear you, that will be in the regular updates. 
> 
> But these interludes will add additional context for the main story, so they are still relevant and relevantly spooky. 
> 
> Thanks again for reading and commenting! Yous guyses are the best!!


	6. Love Advice for the Deceased

“Ever since I met you,” Caspar said, his voice wavering with emotion, “I just felt like... like I wasn’t really living until you were right here with me. Even though I know we aren’t supposed to be together, when we are it just feels so _right_. You’re perfect. Every part of you. And I just want you to know, no matter what, how much I love you.”

“Mrrrow,” Desdemona the cat replied.

Caspar sneezed.

Linhardt briefly considered calling it all a day and turning the wheel tightly rightwards to send them all careening off the side of the mountain they’d slowly been crawling upwards for the last ten miles.

It was a very compelling idea.

“Don’t rub your eyes,” he warned as Caspar snuggled Desdemona closer.

“I’m not going to rub my eyes,” Caspar insisted in sing-song. He noted every beat with the flick of Desdemona’s front paws.

A little history: Linhardt had selected that very cat to be his sole worldly companion because she was absolutely vicious. When he’d first found her in the Tender Hearts Animal Rescue she’d been placed in a rough-worn crate stored not with the other animals but with the mops and brooms less likely to be mauled. They’d wrapped her tight in three separate towels like some sort of demonic burrito to hand her over to him, and he was quite certain he saw at least one of the shelter’s volunteers cross themselves as he initialed her adoption papers.

It had been what many people called a _natural fit._

He’d always been good with animals. This, along with an ample supply of tuna fish, had slowly won Desdemona over to his side. Ever since that fateful day she had been the perfect sidekick, often found purring in his lap as he sat before his townhouse’s bay windows and mused over the futility of man.

Caspar had, in violation of all law and order, charmed her within the first thirty minutes of meeting her that afternoon. He’d then accomplished the equivalent of breaking the space-time continuum by dressing her in one of the tiny sweaters Linhardt had brought for her (he was a monster, but not a _monster_; and it was going to be cold up there, after all) and then in trapping her on his lap for the entirety of their trip north.

He was also apparently extremely allergic to cats which, bless his heart, hadn’t yet dissuaded him from showering her with affection.

It was for Linhardt a very special torture.

“Ack!”

Linhardt squeezed the steering wheel a little tighter and stared haplessly at the snowy road.

“Caspar,” he accused thinly. Caspar huddled tighter against the passenger door, feigning a sudden interest in the unchanging band of evergreens whizzing past.

“Mrrrrmm,” Desdemona added, dropping down from Caspar’s arms to prick her claws against the denim of his jeans. She settled into a contented doughnut shape.

Caspar furtively brushed the sleeve of his sweatshirt against his eyes.

“Caspar!”

“I rubbed my eyes,” he admitted quietly. 

Linhardt bucked his head against the headrest and once again considered that his passenger might have very well been a human-shaped dose of retribution for all of the wicked things he’d done.

“...hey. Are you mad at me?” Surprised by his serious (if somewhat childish) tone, Linhardt glanced over in his direction.

“What?” Caspar frowned.

“About me coming along. I didn’t mean to just, like, insert myself. Although I guess I did... I’m sorry.” Linhardt looked more properly at him. Caspar stared back at him, his red and slightly swollen eyes somehow still wide and sparkling with cartoonish honesty and guilt and more than a little bit of self pity.

Linhardt looked to his lap. Desdemona stared back at him, _her_ eyes wide and sparkling with cartoonish honesty and guilt and more than a little bit of primal fury.

_Traitor_.

“No,” he grumbled through his gritted teeth. “I’m not mad. All of this was just... _unexpected_, that’s all.” He took one of his hands from the wheel to grope for something in the back seat. “Here. I have something for you.”

“Huh?” Caspar caught the little box he’d tossed at him. “What’s this?”

“A peace offering.” Caspar took the lid from the box and gasped.

“Woah! A Saint Cethleann’s medal!” Linhardt’s brows raised slightly.

“You know what it is?”

“Uh, yeah, of course! Caspar lifted the little gold coin-shaped thing, its matching chain trailing behind as admired it more closely. “_The Devil’s Bride_, released in 1978 — Mario Luccenzo’s best, if you ask me. Have you seen it? We are _definitely_ watching it when we get home. They had this whole fake blood rig that was for the time _very_ convincing. Oh man, there’s this part when the priest gets his arm chopped off an—”

“Alright, Caspar, I understand the idea.” Caspar laughed.

“Right, yeah, sorry! No spoilers!” He unclasped the chain and strung it around his neck before plucking up the medallion again for further gleeful inspection. “Well, one spoiler: so, Count Drusillio — vampire, obviously — he falls in love with this really pretty girl from the village,” Caspar dropped the charm to mime two melon-shaped objects at his chest as he said _really_ _pretty_, “and she is totally into him, too. I mean, jackpot for her, right? But he’s worried about her getting chomped by some of his family members, so he gives her a Saint Cethleann’s medal to ward them off. And the best part is that he enchants it with some of his own ancient human blood so that he doesn’t get zapped by it, too. Very big deal, cuz he’s saved this stuff for ages and its not like he’s got, like, a backlog of it, right?”

“Is that right,” Linhardt interrupted flatly.

“Yeah! Super romantic. But then Father Ophelio, village priest, he hears about this and he’s in love with the lady too, right? So he gets all angry and tells everybody that she’s been kidnapped, and—”

“Caspar.”

“Ah! Right. No spoilers!” The car swerved as he shot suddenly sidewards to wrap his arms around Linhardt’s chest. “Thank you so much! It’s so cool!”

“You’re welcome,” Linhardt answered in a suffocated tone as he tried to pry the man off before they truly spun off the mountainside. “It seemed like something you would like.”

“I love it! You’re the best!”

“It’s really not — what are you — _Caspar_,” Linhardt insisted more heatedly as he felt his hands slip from their embrace into his lap.

“Aw, come on,” Caspar replied mischievously. “This is starting to feel a little unfair.” Linhardt made a valiant effort to kick him away as he began to unzip his fly. “Maybe this little guy just needs a change in scener—”

“Caspar!”

The tires squealed as they narrowly missed another plunge to their doom. Desdemona yowled. Caspar laughed, whatever grief he’d had before thoroughly erased by his new gift.

Linhardt thought again of how this was all such a terrible fucking idea.

* * *

They were the last to arrive, but at least they arrived alive (or dead, respectively). Linhardt was somehow corralled into carrying both his handsome leather suitcase and Caspar’s ratty duffel as Caspar danced forward, Desdemona in arm, chattering away as he noted all of the best features of the chalet waiting for them at the end of the icy drive. And yes, it was thoroughly charming — what Swiss expat Edelgard had no doubt devoured to bring it into her possession, lord only knew — but it also stank of all of those miserable bloodsuckers inside and he, quite frankly,was not amused at all.

“Lin! Look! Snowmobiles! Oh my god, I am totally driving one of those. What do you think, Dessie?”

Linhardt really did despise the dastardly art of nicknames. Still, he very nearly almost smiled as he looked sideways to spot Caspar balancing Desdemona’s paws atop one of the snowmobile’s throttles. She did seem rather on board with the idea. 

“Don’t slip,” he warned him as Caspar careened towards the tall steps leading to the chalet’s front door. Caspar slipped, followed after by a triumphant sound as he caught himself on the railing, legs akimbo as his feline passenger neatly rearranged herself on the back of his head.

Linhardt sighed and strode past him to open the door.

He immediately regretted it. _Perhaps they’ll just kill each other_, he’d thought hopefully on their drive. Instead they — so many _theys_ that it was difficult to name them all — were all neatly arranged in the airy living room located immediately inside the doorway, looking very nearly like a seance from one of those ridiculous movies Caspar so adored except for the fact that they’d somehow all coordinated to wear the same ridiculous, thick-knit sweaters like some sort of demented Boy Scout troop.

_Ugh_.

“Linhardt! About time, buddy!” Sylvain stood, a natural host even in a place like this. Someone Linhardt did not recognize was at his heels — a man, tall, a little sullen and with a head of dark-dyed hair. “We thought you might have fallen off of the mountain. Hey there, Caspar. And who is that little cutie? Aww, hello th—” Desdemona stopped his forward advance with a hissing swipe of her claws.

_Good girl_, Linhardt thought, kicking the door closed behind them.

The stomach-like spot inside his abdomen sunk as a new figure rounded the corner into the living room, her face sweeping into a bright shape as she spotted him.

“Fa—” He cut Bernadetta short with a particularly biting glare. “Fa-_riend_! Friend!” She skipped forward to sling her arms around him. Caspar watched on with what appeared to be a thoroughly amazed gape as Linhardt reluctantly returned her embrace.

“Hello, Bernadetta.” She peeked over his shoulder.

“Is that him?”

“Is that _who_, exactly,” Linhardt managed dryly. “Caspar, this is Bernadetta. An old friend of mine.”

“Nice to meet you!” Caspar stopped midstream from slipping off his boots to jut forth his hand in her direction. They both puckered their lips into disappointed frowns as Linhardt batted it away.

“And you know Sylvain,” he added, the _regrettably_ he so wished to include left unsaid. His eyes settled on Sylvain’s unnamed companion. “And...”

“Felix,” the man offered stonily.

Oh. Right. Naturally. That explained the hair.

“You!” They all flinched at Caspar’s bubbly reply. “I know you. You work at the Starbucks on Fifth and Holiday, right?” Felix glanced over at Sylvain. Sylvain grinned in a throughly guilty way before quickly nodding his head.

“Yes,” Felix answered, far less enthusiastically. “I...do. I’m Sylvain’s—”

“Lover,” Sylvain interrupted with a croon, slinking his arms around the man’s waist. Felix’s face remained unchanged.

“Yes,” he said again in exactly the same monotone.

“Wow, what a small world! Nice to see you again!” Caspar turned towards Linhardt. His ultra-watt smile made it clear that he expected an additional round of introductions. Linhardt sighed.

“That is Petra,” he offered blandly. The woman nodded in reply. “And Lysithea, Fleche, Randolph. All old friends.” The named creatures all waved cheerily at Caspar with their introductions, as if they were simply attendants at some sort of AA meeting and them ready to admit that they just had a drinking problem, really.

Well. He supposed they did, in so many words.

“You have a lot of friends!” Sylvain laughed at the incredulous pitch of Caspar’s tone.

“Hmm,” Linhardt said. His eyes settled last on a lump wrapped in a black blanket and lurking in the far corner of the room. “Hello, Hubert.”

“Hello,” Hubert answered miserably 

“Hi, Mr. Vestra!”

“Hello, Caspar,” the lump replied.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, Caspar. Thank you.” Caspar glanced over at Linhardt. He ignored his worried stare in the same wildly effective way he’d ignored Hubert entirely.

They all suffered together in an awkward moment of silence before Sylvain noticed their bags.

“So, you guys get a room upstairs. Allow me to assist you, monsieur.” Linhardt shoved Caspar’s bag into Sylvain’s insufferably theatric bow.

“Asshole,” Sylvain muttered. He ignored this neatly, too.

They clipped up the elegant wind of the lodge’s central staircase, Sylvain at the lead and with Felix at the rear. Desdemona had arranged herself into a crouch on Caspar’s shoulder and was fully occupied with the task of hissing at the ghoulish man.

“Aw, come on, Dessie,” Caspar chided her before sneezing again. “Be nice.”

They all came to a stop on the landing at the top of the stairs, their eyes focusing in unison on the brass knob of the door waiting for them there.

_Shit_, Linhardt realized.

He peeked over at Caspar and watched as the tips of his ears turned a rather fluorescent shade of pink.

“One room,” the vampire observed.

“Well, yeah,” Sylvain replied. “I mean, this place is definitely swanky, but what were you expecting? It’s not exactly the Ritz, Linny boy. Besides, aren’t you guys fu—”

“It’s fine,” Linhardt insisted tightly, snatching Caspar’s bag back from the incubus’ arms and tossing it into the room. His own suitcase followed after before he shut the door again.

“It’s fine,” he said again, this time to Caspar, who had become a very convincing impersonation of a fully boiled lobster.

For someone who had made a full time hobby out of sexting him, he certainly was quite bashful.

Still. He could relate. He’d never made a very good bedfellow, either. 

“Where’s Ferdinand?” Linhardt decided to pull off the metaphorical bandaid of the evening before steam started to spill from Caspar’s ears. Sylvain’s cocky grin faltered. He watched with bemusement as the incubus glanced between all three of them, no doubt dedicating each of his seven brain cells to the task of building a believable excuse for why the gregarious tennis instructor was suddenly... well, hissing in a pit, somewhere, or locked in one of Hubert’s caskets, perhaps or, even better, simply dead.

_Please_, Linhardt begged silently, _please let him be dead_.

“He’s a little under the weather,” Sylvain revealed. “Got a bit too friendly with old Jack Daniels last night, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, no! What a terrible way to celebrate his birthday,” Caspar bemoaned. “Poor Ferdie.”

“Poor Ferdie,” Sylvain agreed with a newly freshened smile.

“That’s so unlike him,” Caspar continued as Linhardt shooed them back down the stairs and away from the tricky complexity of that room and the _fucking twin bed are you serious, were they children, was this a joke_. “I thought he didn’t drink?”

“Well, yes,” Sylvain choked. “I think that was the problem.”

“Ah,” Caspar agreed sagely. “Well, can we at least say hello?”

“We should let him get some rest,” Linhardt suggested quickly. Caspar seemed to accept the judgment readily enough, which made it quite the shame that they were then intercepted by Ladislava (that grim old bitch) at the bottom of the stairs.

“Linhardt,” she greeted him stonily. Her eyes darted briefly to Caspar before, seemingly unimpressed, they centered on him again. She shoved a crinkling grocery bag into his hands. “See to Ferdinand.”

He peeked inside the bag and nearly tottered over.

Oh, how much he hated them.

“Uh,” Sylvain offered with a strangled laugh, “Cas, let’s go take a lookie-loo at this evening’s drink selection, shall we?” He slung his arm over Caspar’s shoulder and yowled (nearly exactly like Desdemona, it must be said, which was really quite impressive) just as he made contact.

“Err,” said Caspar as he watched him knead tenderly at his arm.

“Must’ve shocked me,” Sylvain offered with another nervous titter of laughter as he pointed at Caspar’s mismatched socks (_oh, sorry!_, Caspar peeped). And maybe that damned bastard really was his friend, Linhardt reluctantly conceded to himself.

“Go on, then. I’ll tell Ferdinand that you’re here,” he sighed. Caspar nodded, still clearly a bit bewildered by the whole situation but no doubt tempted by the irresistible prospect of a snack.

“Okay. See you in a bit?” Linhardt nodded and watched as the duo (well, trio, and yes, there went Felix, of course) retreat into the living room and what he supposed was the kitchen beyond.

“You look like shit,” Ladislava observed once they were alone.

“Aren’t you just as charming as ever.” She shrugged her shoulders before waving at a nearby door. 

“Fine,” he sighed defeatedly. And maybe if he’d still been a living, breathing man he would have dumped the disgusting contents of that bag and strung it over his head to suffocate himself. 

But he wasn’t, of course, and so he didn’t, but he did allow himself to feel somewhat relieved that that stupid little medallion had worked. At least that, unlike everything else, hadn’t been such a colossal waste of time.

* * *

“Uh... is this it?”

“Yeah! Isn’t that alright?”

Caspar stared blankly into the refrigerator’s chilly depths.

So, _alright_ was subjective. Lots of things were _alright_. He felt alright, even if he was a little hungry and his throat was still scratchy from kissing Desdemona’s tiny, precious head. Their abridged road trip north had been alright, and no matter that Linhardt had been so grumpy for every minute of it (and besides, he was always grumpy, and Caspar sort of liked that part about him; honestly, it was kind of hot).

And lettuce was alright, just like turkey was alright, and he supposed that white bread was alright as well. However, arranged as they were now — a singular, unwrapped head of lettuce propped on one of the refrigerator’s shelves and above it, on its own personal shelf, an entire frozen turkey large enough to feed a family of fifteen; and then, inexplicably, a full loaf of Wonderbread still in its packaging and shoved into what was supposed to be a spot to store a bottle of wine — it was... well, it was a bit more _unusual_ than it was _alright_.

He glanced over at the six plastic handles of vodka waiting on the nearby kitchen counter, all unopened and looking rather dangerous, and wondered just what he was supposed to make out of all of that combined. 

“Uh,” Caspar managed again as he looked over at Sylvain. “Are you hungry?”

“Ah, nah, that’s okay,” the man replied with another one of his handsome grins. “I just ate. Go ahead.”

“...Okay,” he said as he reached forward to collect the ingredients for a rather minimalist sandwich. He looked for a plate in the kitchen’s wide array of cabinets afterwards and was for some reason unsurprised to find none.

“So,” Sylvain continued as he popped up to sit on one of the counters. “How’s everything going with you and Lin?”

Caspar cleared his throat and felt a fresh wave of heat spread over his cheeks.

“Good,” he managed as he tore a leaf of lettuce free and arranged it across two slices of bread. “Fine. It’s fine. Everything is fine.”

Sylvain laughed and fished through his pockets for his phone.

“Is that why you texted me this last night?” Caspar’s stomach sunk as he glanced over at the screen.

_how du know if some1 likes u_

_like_

_like likes u_

_?_

“It’s fine,” Caspar squeaked again.

“You know, I’ve known Linhardt for ages. He doesn’t like to admit it, but we’re actually pretty chummy. If anybody knows how to translate _Linhardt_ into _normal_, it’s definitely me. Why don’t you tell me about it? Maybe I can help.”

Caspar absentmindedly peeled another sheath of lettuce free and began to shred it intogreen confetti.

“I mean, I don’t know,” he mumbled. “He drives me to work everyday, and he won’t even let me pay him gas money. And he’s super weird about lunch, but he still goes with me most of the time. I think he likes being around me? Even though he doesn’t really say that much when we’re together.”

“What about...” Sylvain offered, looping the pointer finger and thumb of his right hand into an oval shape and prodding the second digit of his left through the center with a suggestive cocking of his brow. Caspar felt a bead of sweat gather on the back of his neck.

“T-that, I mean, the... _hand stuff_,” he sputtered in a near-whisper. “Sometimes. And it seems like he’s into it, but like, it’s always just me? I dunno, it’s like... Do you... do you think he thinks I’m gross? Or something? And that’s why he doesn’t want me to touch him?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Sylvain sighed, his teasing look dissolving into something difficult to define that, for some reason, made Caspar feel downright miserable. “No. Definitely not.”

Caspar began to mash a fresh slice of bread into a lumpy ball.

“I dunno. It’s... I dunno. This is probably pretty obvious, but I haven’t been in many relationships before.” What that meant, really, was that his experience was built entirely out of a very confusing night of dry humping with Ashe back when they’d been in high school and a series of enlightening, if somewhat regrettable, rendezvous with men discovered on a trashy dating app when he’d finally moved away from home. But Sylvain didn’t need to know that. Right?

“Listen,” Sylvain told him gently. “Linhardt is like... an entirely different creature from people like you and me. He literally doesn’t understand what it means to be a regular human being. Most sane people would find that a little off-putting, but if you like his particular brand of weird, then don’t worry about the rest. He obviously cares about you. Trust me. You’d know if he didn’t, and it wouldn’t be because he... well, whatever. You get what I mean.” Caspar peeled apart a piece of crust into a pile of microscopic shreds.

“But,” Sylvain continued, “you might need to be pretty straightforward with him. If you missed it earlier — he’s really fucking strange. If it were up to him, he’d probably just drive around jerking you off until you’re ninety years old, and without ever bothering to ask you how you felt about it.” The image of them all withered and grey and going at it finally made Caspar laugh. Sylvain seemed to take the sound as a victory sign. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Caspar agreed. “Thanks, Sylvain.” He still felt a little nervous, but Sylvain probably had a point. And he could do it, right? After all, he’d done far scarier things than admit his feelings to someone.

Maybe.

Kind of.

Well, actually, no, not really.

He took a bite of his lettuce sandwich and tried his best not to think about it.

* * *

“Ferdinand?”

“Go away,” something croaked from behind the paisley shower curtain. Linhardt sighed.

“I’m not going away. Come out of there.”

“...Linhardt?”

“Unfortunately yes,” he agreed as he dumped his bag on the floor and took a seat cross-legged on the periwinkle bathmat arranged in front of the sink. It really wasn’t a very good place for brooding, to be honest. Not that he would have expected Ferdinand to do any better. He eyed a watercolor painting of grazing deer with disdain as he listened to the man — well, vampire, now — squeaking into a new pose in the basin of the bathtub he’d squirreled himself away in.

“Linhardt,” he whispered through the polyurethane barrier between them. “You need to get out of here. It isn’t safe.”

“Obviously,” he quipped, his eyes settling on the doily cover strapped over the toilet seat. _Disgusting_. “But that hardly changes the matter at hand.”

“You don’t understand,” Ferdinand insisted, his voice warping into a cracking sob. “Hubie, he... and little Lysithea, and you... You... Wait.” He scuttled again against the tub. “You... You can’t mean to tell me that _you_...”

“Listen, Ferdinand. If I were in your shoes I would no doubt find myself equally disappointed with your current situation. I am positive that Hubert has handled every second of his time together with you in exactly the wrong way. You can’t blame him, really; he’s always been an imbecile. Still, no matter what happens, one can’t always get what one wants. Clearly, as I am now here in this horrendous little bathroom and talking to you. With that in mind, would you please stop acting like such a child?”

“A child! Linhardt, I’m a _monster_!” He made some sounds that Linhardt supposed meant that he was crying.

It was very annoying.

“Yes, yes,” he tutted. “Charmed, I’m sure. Nonetheless, the fact remains that you will soon be a _dead_ monster if you don’t eat something.” There was some irony in this directive, but he decided to ignore it.

The shower curtain crackled as it was tweaked a nanosecond to the side. An eye he imagined could only belong to Ferdinand peeked through.

“Linhardt,” he whispered. “Are you really... are you really like me?”

“No.” He rolled his eyes. “But I am a vampire, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“That’s absurd,” Ferdinand countered, as if he wasn’t the same damned thing himself. Honestly, how long was this supposed to go on? “You don’t... you don’t look like a vampire. You look like a librarian.”

“You know, I’ve actually known quite a few of us who prefer that very occupation. It does rather make sense.”

Ferdinand finally drew back the curtain, which he supposed was some sort of victory. He looked quite haggard, his hair mussed and unwashed, the unbecoming scarlet sweater and khaki slacks he was wearing no doubt of the same status. And what would his tennis stars say to see him now?

“You don’t... you don’t have teeth!” Ferdinand pointed at his own, his finger trembling against the sharp edges of his newly-acquired canines.

“Obviously I do,” Linhardt sighed. “What on earth are you trying to say?”

“Fangs, Linhardt!” Ferdinand hooked his fingers into what Linhardt assumed to be fang shapes at either side of his mouth, apparently oblivious to the fact that miming was quite unnecessary, him already endowed with the real version himself.

“Did Hubert truly tell you _nothing_?” Ferdinand frowned, still four-times fanged with his fingers and those two little points poking out of the curving line of his lips. “Don’t you think that it would be a bit too obvious if we couldn’t hide them away? Honestly, Ferdinand, use your brain. And before you say anything _no_, I certainly will not show you how.” Linhardt’s lips puckered into a disgusted frown of his own. “I am not putting my fingers in your mouth. Let’s be quite clear on _that_. Now,” he reached sideways to snatch up the grocery bag and rattle it in the man’s direction. “Dinner time.”

“...What...what is that?” Ferdinand’s voice was properly horrified.

Honestly, Linhardt was of the very rare mind to be quite in agreement with him.

And so here was a secret that he was not keen to share — and yes, he was very much aware of how terribly ironic it was, and perhaps even unbelievable in its absurdity — but, and from a very young age, Linhardt had been absolutely disgusted by the sight of blood. At ten, for example, he’d tumbled down a three-set of stairs when his father had accidentally cut himself shaving and properly passed out when he’d realized he’d skinned his own knee in the endeavor. It had made his eventual profession as a man of medicine terribly complicated, and that had been nothing compared to the extreme measures he had to go to now, given that his entire diet was made up of the nasty red stuff.

But he had learned the trick of it, him being a terribly clever fellow, and yet all of that was now undone by the fact that Ladislava, in all of her brilliance, had decided that the best means to break Ferdinand’s hunger strike was to inelegantly fill an empty water bottle full of some poor bastard’s blood and shove it off on Linhardt like he was some hellish milkman.

It was utterly unhygienic, for one thing, and many other things besides. Unfortunately, none of them was that it wasn’t a good idea.

“Fruit punch,” he told him glibly. “You need to drink it.” He shoved the bag into Ferdinand's lap before he grew too lightheaded.

“W-where... where did it come from?” Linhardt screwed his eyes shut with aggravation.

“Where do you _think_ it came from, Ferdinand?”

“Are they... are they dead?”

_Well, they certainly weren’t better off_, he wanted to contend.

“Just drink it,” is what he said.

“I don’t want to.”

“We’ve already gone over this. It doesn’t matter what you want.” Ferdinand’s lips trembled.

“I know... I know that!” He hugged his chest tight. “None of this is what I wanted!”

_Oh, for fuck’s sake._

“I just,” Ferdinand blubbered on, “Hubie... He, he told me that he didn’t want to live without me and I... I mean, I agreed, how could I not? I felt the same. I thought he meant an _engagement_, Linhardt, not this!” He gestured brusquely at the bag. “And what I am supposed to do now? Just _murder_ innocent people?”

“Well, they don’t have to be innocent,” Linhardt suggested dryly. Ferdinand winced, clearly not appeased by the notion.

“I won’t do it! I’m telling you, I won’t!”

“Listen to me,” Linhardt snapped, utterly bereft of his usual patience given his unintended new diet. “You can manage this however you want. Be a mosquito, for all I fucking care. In the meantime, however, you need to drink this or you are going to die, and for some inexplicable reason that will be _my_ fault, and I am absolutely _not_ going to bother with all of that. Do you understand? Drink it!”

Ferdinand cowered against the tub.

“I don’t—”

“Drink it!”

And here was the benefit of lingering around for so long, and for being a member of such a stodgy old society that respected longevity above all else: Ferdinand listened to him. Hands quivering, he peeled open the plastic bag and unscrewed the bottle’s cap. Linhardt looked away as he tipped the to his lips.

About fucking time.

They sat together quietly for perhaps a bit too long.

“Ferdinand,” Linhardt began again finally. “I’m... sorry that these things have happened to you. Hubert was being... _insensitive_, to say the least, in how he carried all of this out. That being said, even I must admit that he cares deeply for you. If you can still stand to be around him — and certainly I would not blame you if you cannot — I have no doubt that he will help you with your transition, and in whatever way you deem best. And, if you would prefer the opposite, I am also certain that he will give you whatever space you like. In that instance, which I must say I prefer, there are plenty of us here who can help you adjust."

Ferdinand nodded, crumpling the bag between his fingers.

“...Alright.” Linhardt bobbed his head as well and stood, smoothing the creases in his slacks once he had.

“Oh,” he added. “Also. I understand that you are acquainted with Caspar von Bergliez.”

“Cas?” Ferdinand glanced up from his sulking to stare at Linhardt with a fresh dose of confusion. “Yes... why?”

Linhardt fought the urge to roll his eyes.

“Caspar is here as well.”

“Caspar?! He’s like this, too?”

“No,” he corrected him curtly. “Nor is he aware of the situation, so I would appreciate it if you wou—”

“You leave him alone!” Ferdinand shot suddenly to his feet, obviously feeling quite energized by his long-awaited meal. “Do you hear me? He’s a good man, Linhardt! He doesn’t deserve that!”

“Yes, I—”

“I won’t let you! I’ll... I’ll fight you!” For some reason Ferdinand decided to ball his fists into an exaggerated boxing pose. 

“Well, as amusing as that would be to watch, it also sounds quite exhausting, so let’s overstep it entirely, shall we?” Ferdinand glared rather menacingly in his direction. It almost made him feel proud. “I’m not going to hurt him, Ferdinand. No one is going to hurt him. He was the one who wanted to come along. For some reason he thinks today is your birthday,” and not like he was going to reveal that that reason was _him_. “So, it would be best if you would just play along. And ask someone how to put those away, would you?” He flicked his fingers at Ferdinand’s snarling mouth. “You look ridiculous. Honestly. Get ahold of yourself. You’re not some kind of animal.”

Or maybe he was. Who knows. Linhardt hardly had the energy to mull it over too closely. He turned and left instead, his mind filled with what might have been a prayer in the hopes that he could just go to sleep, now, and perhaps stay that way for at least a few blissfully uncomplicated days.

His prayers were not answered, firstly because there was no deity to answer them (as previously discussed), and perhaps secondly because even if there was a God or Zeus or what-have you, they certainly wouldn’t have put him at the top of their list of wishes-to-be-granted.

“Hi!” Caspar greeted him cheerily as Linhardt entered into their room, cross-legged on the floor and apparently in the middle of changing Desdemona into her third sweater of the evening.

_Please_, he prayed again, _please just kill me. Please just let me die._

“Hello, Caspar.”

“Did you talk to Ferdie?”

“Yes,” he told him as he shuffled towards the bed. Desdemona mewled at him as he sunk into the stiff mattress. _Horrible_. It creaked and clanked as he flopped back onto his back.

“How is he doing?”

“Better.” Linhardt stared into the spinning blades of the ceiling fan overhead. Flip flip flip. He wondered briefly if he would be decapitated if he stuck his neck between them, and then next pondered on the idea of if that would really do anything, anyways, other than turn him into quite the interesting Halloween decoration. “He’s resting again, but I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you tomorrow.”

“Great!”

Linhardt’s chest filled with a confounding mix of happiness and utter dread as he felt the bed sink beside him when Caspar crawled up to join him.

“Maybe we can go hiking tomorrow,” Caspar suggested as he switched onto his side. “Or snowshoeing! Do you think they have snowshoes? Have you ever gone snowshoeing before?”

“No.”

“Do you wanna?” Linhardt shut his eyes.

“...Sure.”

Caspar kept on talking, but for some reason he couldn’t shake the image of Ferdinand cowering in the tub downstairs from his mind. All things considered, the man had come to terms with his new life quite well. Still, things would be difficult for him from now on. They generally were. Some might even call it a torture — not a torture like suffering through all of those gory horror movies, but something honest and harrowing.

And that’s why Linhardt had always lived the way he had, perfectly content in being lonely as he made meals of men whose faces he forgot even more quickly than their names. It was better that way — better to keep those two worlds as far apart as possible: his dark one and the brighter-lit places where good, honest people lived.

People like Caspar. _He’s a good man_, all of those monsters drawn to him kept saying and they were right, of course. He was naive and far too trusting, but he was kind; and funny, and generous and far more clever than he put on.

So what in the hell was he doing _there_?

Linhardt sighed.

He was such an asshole.

“Lin. _Lin_. Hey.” He peeked open one of his eyes.

“What was it, again?” Caspar’s face was filled with a blush he hadn’t been wearing before.

“I knew you weren’t listening,” he huffed. “I want to ask you a question.” Linhardt realized that the rapid thrumming in his ears wasn’t some strange drum circle outside but the sound of Caspar’s quick-beating heart.

Oh, no.

Desdemona leapt into the bed, apparently readying herself for emotional support as she curled into Caspar’s side.

“Just, like,” Caspar began, fiddling with the cat’s kneading paws, “we’re... are we like, dating?”

Linhardt very desperately wished for the ability to sink into the ground.

“Dating?”

“Like,” Caspar sputtered, “can... do you want to be my boyfriend?”

Oh. No.

Seeing that he couldn’t transmute himself into a pillow to hide, Linhardt stood instead.

“Caspar,” he answered thinly, beginning to pace the room. “I.. Listen. I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

Caspar’s face crumpled like a high-stacked tower of cards.

“Why?”

“We’re... we’re just very different people.”

“So you don’t like me?”

“It isn’t that,” he insisted lamely. “Just that I think there are probably far better matches out there for you than myself.” He wasn’t sure exactly where _out there_ was, exactly (perhaps in that sea filled with all of those fish people were always going on about), but it seemed to be the only thing left for him to say. 

“I don’t think so,” Caspar muttered, glancing away to focus on his absentminded toying with Desdemona’s paws. The cat, remarkably patient, watched on as he pressed on the pink pads of her feet. Her claws extended and retracted, sharp but for once not digging into an unlucky victim. “I like being with you.”

Linhardt realized that perhaps his prayers had been heard, and that he was in fact in the very painful first stages of dying.

“Well, I like being with you, too, Caspar, but that doesn’t — _fuck_,” he snapped, interrupted by his fiddling with an arrangement of tchotchkes spread over one of the dressers — one of which happened to be a little silver dish. Fucking _honestly_? He stuck his burned finger into his mouth and sucked on it morosely.

Caspar watched on with a very sharp set of eyes.

“Just that I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Linhardt amended again. “I’m sorry. We can talk about it later.” This was a lie, of course, but it was the only thing he could think of to signal his escape. Caspar gave a final miserable squeeze of Desdemona’s paws. The cat purred, either oblivious to the misery that had filled the room or — far more likely — blissfully pleased by it in the same way that she so loved to claw at Linhardt’s ankles from hidden spots at home.

Linhardt reached for the door.

He learned two things quickly afterwards:

  1. Caspar was very fast; and 
  2. Caspar was _very_ strong. 

“What are you doing,” he snapped helplessly as Caspar strung him into a hug and tugged him backwards onto the carpet. “Let go. Honestly, this isn—”

“I just wanna check something,” Caspar told him cryptically.

“I don’t — what are you doing!” Caspar’s fingers prodded at his mouth.

_Don’t you put those in there_, a voice inside him demanded, his mind filling with images of Desdmona's little paws and the blue litter of her litterbox. _I know where they’ve been_.

A louder voice warned him that this was a very, very bad situation. Of the _train barreling towards you and you hogtied on the tracks_ variety, in fact. 

“Caspar,” he insisted more sternly. “Don’t. Stop it. Don’t — duhn puh yer fwgyahs n ma ma—”

The final words of his useless order turned to gibberish around Caspar’s spelunking fingers.

They both froze into a set of crooked shapes as Caspar pressed his pointer finger against the roof of Linhardt’s mouth in exactly the same way that he had been prodding at Desdemona’s paws before. And, just like her sharp little claws had lazily extended with that particular ministration, so too did Linhardt’s canines.

Fuck.

_Fuck_.

F_u_ck.

Fu_c_k.

Fuc_k_.

_Fuck._

“Cashwar,” Linhardt managed breathlessly, suddenly quite focused on the very important task of not biting him.

“I knew it,” Caspar whispered. “Holy crap.”


	7. Snack Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I initially intended this chapter to be a fluffy Ferdibert side story, but I'll be real with you guys: I'm personally a super impatient reader, so I couldn't in good conscience leave the main story off on a cliffhanger for too long. I especially didn't want to do that because you all have been SO RIDICULOUSLY SWEET and WONDERFUL with all of your comments that cliffhangers seem positively criminal. 
> 
> To that point -- OMG guys, @crypttcrawler illustrated a scene from chapter 3 and it is DIVINE and includes BOWLING SHOES and I am dutifully including a [link here](https://twitter.com/crypttcrawler/status/1197715500391915522) because it is Important Supplemental Material. 
> 
> Thank you all again for your super amazing support!

“Oh. My. God,” Sylvain groaned as he lurked into the room. “Listen. You know that place in the mall where you can get stuff engraved? Like, Christmas ornaments and ash trays and stuff?”

“Mnn,” Linhardt replied from his deflated hunch over the kitchen table. In any other circumstance he would have simply walked away — for one, he knew absolutely nothing about the mall, the least of which being whatever hellish shop the incubus was describing; and, moreover, it was far too early in the morning for anything so distinctly _Sylvain_ — but in that very moment he could do nothing more than linger with his forehead pressed flat against the tabletop.

“Right,” Sylvain continued, undeterred. “Well, new business opportunity, buddy, because I think I could cut a diamond in half with my dick.”

Linhardt slowly rolled his head to the side until he was facing in his direction. There were a few things that he supposed even he needed to understand more fully. This seemed to be one of them.

“What on earth you are talking about,” he rasped. Sylvain gestured animatedly at his crotch.

“I’m starving to death over here!”

This alpine adventure of theirs really was quite the well-tailored torture.

“The barista,” Linhardt offered flatly. Sylvain groaned.

“I know! But Felix _likes_ him, the little minx. And Hubert says that it’s better to have another human around — and yes, of course I know that, because I was the genius who told him so — so that’s pretty convenient for _him_, but what about me? I have needs too, you know! _Augh_! It’s going to fall off, Lindy! Like a goddamned bottle rocket!” Sylvain whistled as he mimed the spinning trajectory of his neglected genitals.

“It’s been two days.”

“Six,” he corrected him glumly, “because I have to hold full-on casting calls for his majesty the Princess Fraldarius — it’s not like I have a closet full of men just waiting for his review, you know. And I mean, for something like this? Let’s just say that our charming little coffee-maker is his special vacation outfit. It was a selective process, to say the very least.”

“I don’t care,” Linhardt croaked.

“Well, I care. Have you ever had a boner for _six_ _fucking days?_” Sylvain took a pause from his diatribe to inspect Linhardt more closely. “Shit, man. You look horrible.”

“Thank you,” came Linhardt’s creaking reply. Sylvain prodded a testing finger against his shoulder.

“Speaking of eating,” the incubus observed, and in a way that Linhardt supposed would have been clever if his misery wasn’t so obvious, “what exactly are you up to? Is this some kind of cry for help?”

“No.”

“You know, I think Ladislava has some poor bastards locked up in that guest cabin next to the lake. Well, not _think_ — I know she does, because she told me to tell you.”

Linhardt frowned, his cheek mashing against the tabletop. Even if he hadn’t been so recently determined to die, he would never stoop to the level of hunting chained men in dark rooms. There was a reason why he at least bought his victims a nice dinner before he ate them. He might have been a villain in either case, but there was something particularly despicable about eating someone who was terrified. The fact that the rest of them were so graceless about it didn’t have anything to do with him.

“No.”

Sylvain crouched beside him. Linhardt supposed this was a sign that he meant to have a heart-to-heart. Although he would usually berate him for the effort, at least now he was no longer eye-level with his indefatigable erection.

“Hey,” Sylvain said, resting his chin against the edge of the table. “What’s up?”

It really was so horribly inconvenient to have a friend.

“...Caspar,” Linhardt slowly relented. Sylvain cocked his brows.

“Caspar what?” Linhardt recreated the fanged miming Ferdinand had shown him the day before with a twitch of his fingers.

“...he knows.”

“He knows what? He knows _what!?_” Sylvain’s blood-deprived brain — or whatever it was that filled his veins and therefore his preferred organs (probably strawberry flavored lubricant) — appeared to slowly tick through a series of realizations. “Shit, Linhardt. How the hell did that happen?”

“Mnn,” Linhardt replied, shuttering his eyes.

“Oh no. You don’t get off the hook that easily. Tell me what happened.”

“No.”

“Lin,” Sylvain insisted. “Look, pal... You don’t seem to be in the best shape for damage control.” He was right, which was of course a thoroughly disturbing idea. Linhardt slowly peeled his eyelids open. “What happened?”

Linhardt stared at the morning sun sparkling through the kitchen windows. As much as Caspar’s extensive movie collection had damned him, his only wish was that they’d all been right. How much easier it would have been to crawl into the cheery sunbeam stretching across the tiles in order to simply burst into flames — after all, a pile of ash didn’t owe much of an explanation to anyone.

But he wasn’t one, regrettably, and so he supposed he did. He sighed and began to piece together the brightly-colored building blocks of his memories from the night before. Sylvain waited patiently, perhaps eager for a few lewd details to snack on during his momentary stint of celibacy.

**_It_**, as Linhardt then reluctantly shared, happened as follows:

* * *

“I knew it,” Caspar whispered. “Holy crap.”

_This_, Linhardt’s mind chugged on indelicately, his jaw quivering around Caspar’s fingers, _is not good_. He wondered briefly if the Titanic’s night’s watchmen had shared the same sentiment as he’d spotted that old glacier looming in the distance. The two situations seemed roughly equivalent to Linhardt, in any case, and that is to say that they were equally disastrous.

One of Caspar’s fingers brushed against his tongue. The memory of crunching over Desdemona’s spilled litter was enough to finally spur him into action. He wrenched his arms free from Caspar’s embrace to carefully bring an end to the man’s rather indecent inspection.

“Caspar,” he tested slowly. Caspar’s face blanched before broiling to a candy-sweet pink.

“Yah!”

Linhardt’s next thoughts, so painstakingly collected, clattered into a stub-nosed collision as Caspar suddenly lurched forward to rip the quilt from the nearby bed. He flung it over Linhardt with the same smooth motion. The blanket was then tucked taut against his shoulders, apparently weighed down by something conspicuously Caspar-shaped.

“What. Are. You. _Doing_?” Linhardt sputtered, noting with another annoyed prick in his stomach-like parts that a four-legged creature had leapt onto his shrouded head in her newest show of disobedience.

“I don’t want you to fly away!” Caspar insisted shrilly from outside Linhardt’s quilted prison.

“Fly — Caspar, I can’t _fly_.”

“A bat!” came Caspar’s absurd reply.

“I’m not a bat!” Caspar didn’t seem convinced. Linhardt pushed helplessly against one of the quilt’s polka dot squares, noting again with much bemusement the efficacy of Caspar’s workout regimen.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Caspar!” Linhardt sucked in a deep breath to steady his tone. “I am absolutely positive that I’m not, nor will I ever be, a bat!”

A pair of fingers wormed their way under the quilt. Linhardt, having learned just how dangerous they were, watched them warily. The quilt was slowly peeled back from the carpet to accommodate a peeking blue eye.

“Hi,” Caspar whispered. A very inconvenient feeling of fondness cluttered Linhardt’s chest.

“Hello.”

“Are you mad?” His question poked a proper hole in the otherwise dire situation. Linhardt rubbed at his temples and wondered for perhaps the thousandth time just what kind of bizarre set of circumstances had created a man like him.

“No, Caspar. I’m not mad. Can you please let me out?”

“Are you going to run away?” Alright, that was a bit preposterous. He was the ancient and all-powerful fiend, after all — why was _he_ the one who was supposed to turn tail and run?

“No.”

Caspar eyed him quietly before disappearing again. Linhardt felt compelled to chide him for not asking a far more important question (_are you going to eat me?_), but kept quiet as he felt the man slowly loosen the quilt’s taut pull.

“Hi,” Caspar echoed as Linhardt emerged and bunched the quilt down around his shoulders. For some reason he decided to keep it there, finding some comfort in the ugly thing even though, once again, he really should have been the one in this scenario with the upper hand.

“You’re a vampire,” Caspar continued with another tight whisper.

“No,” Linhardt promised. Caspar frowned and pointed at the mirror hung on the far wall. Linhardt followed the line of his finger and found himself staring back at a man with a head of mussed green hair and two very decidedly vampire-looking fangs.

_Aw, fuck._

He quickly loosened the little muscle located at the top of his mouth that Caspar had so indelicately mashed tight. Those two pesky teeth in his reflection leveled back into a far more regulatory length. Perhaps this process of normalization was not so very convincing — and done backwards, at the very least — but it seemed worth a try.

“You’re a vampire,” Caspar insisted.

_Shit._

“I am...” Linhardt began. His mind spun as he tried to think of a good excuse. _A pervert?_ Surely someone had invented some sort of device to mimic their favorite sharp-toothed hero from the half-baked erotica he’d often seen tucked in his preferred library’s less prominently displayed shelves. Then again, Caspar seemed the type to know far more about _that_ sort of thing than he did, and how on earth could he possibly trick an expert?

“...I am,” Linhardt echoed miserably, and this time ladening his voice with a decisive down-tic.

“Holy shit,” Caspar repeated. For some reason Linhardt nodded.

“Do you... do you drink blood?”

“...Yes,” he decided to reveal, if only to avoid being trundled up in that quilt again.

“Is that why you never eat lunch with me?”

“Yes.”

“Holy shit,” Caspar said again. “But you have a reflection.”

“Well, yes.”

“And we go out into the sun all of the time!”

“We do.”

“You’re not very sparkly.”

“Thankfully not.” Caspar inched closer to him.

“Are you... are you undead?”

“Er,” said Linhardt. “What?” Caspar, for some inexplicable reason, reached forward to touch the tip of his nose.

“Were you a human?” Linhardt frowned.

“Once, yes.”

“When?”

“Let’s not get into the specifics.”

“Holy shit,” he pronounced once more. “Are you like, really old?”

“You do realize that’s rude, don’t you?” Caspar’s bewildered stare finally faltered as he laughed. Honestly, Linhardt didn’t find it very funny. Some things were better left unsaid, thank you very much.

“Oh my god... are you, like, a hundred years old?”

“No, Caspar,” Linhard sighed. Caspar’s brows sailed towards his hairline.

“_Two_ hundred?”

“We’re not going to play this game.”

“_Three hundred?_”

“Caspar!”

“Did you... did you know Abraham Lincoln?”

“What?” Caspar’s eyes grew wider.

“Michelangelo?”

“What!?” 

“_Jesus?_”

“Caspar I didn’t..._No_!” Linhardt caged his hands over his face and groaned. “No, I didn’t have the pleasure, alright? Enough!” Caspar miraculously complied, which made him only more worried. Linhardt peeked between his fingers and caught sight of him looking suddenly crestfallen.

“Is that why you said we couldn’t date?” Caspar’s lips puckered into a frown. “Did you really think that I wouldn’t accept you as you are?”

The withered raisin that had once been Linhardt’s heart creaked achingly in his chest.

“That... It isn’t,” he stuttered, “it isn’t that simple.” Caspar crossed his arms.

“It’s,” Linhardt pressed on stubbornly, “Listen. Your world and mine are kept apart for very good reasons. It’s important that they don’t mix. This... you can’t just _know_ about it, alright?”

Caspar answered by quickly covering his eyes. Linhardt’s brow furrowed as he tried to reason out just what in the hell he was doing.

“What are you doing,” he relented quickly.

“I’m not going to let you hypnotize me,” Caspar insisted with a puff of his chest.

“Hyp—_what?_” Caspar’s lips gritted into a stubborn line.

“I’m not going to let you make me forget about you!” Caspar’s fingers twitched as he quickly glanced between them. “You can do that, right?”

“I mean,” Linhardt admitted before he caught himself. “I’m not going to hypnotize you, Caspar.” _Not again, at least_. They sat in silence for a moment before Caspar slowly lowered his hands.

“You promise?”

“Yes, I promise,” he sighed. “But you can’t tell anyone, alright?”

This was a very important point, and Linhardt wasn’t certain if he’d ever be able to belabor it enough. After all, when a vampire was discovered he was generally presented with two options: eat the clever bastard or turn him before he had the chance to rat him out. He supposed hypnotizing was an interesting idea, but that was generally relegated to simpler things like _“come into my lair”_. In any case, he wasn’t going to eat Caspar, and he certainly wasn’t going to turn him, so they were in quite the sticky predicament.

“I’m serious,” he added quickly. “It’s absolutely critical that you don’t. Not to anyone — Ashe, your family, no one. Do you understand?” Caspar nodded.

“Okay.” _Okay_ did not perhaps summon the gravity required of such an agreement, but apparently it was all that he was going to get. Linhardt sighed and shot a dirty look at Desdemona, who he felt was more or less guilty for this whole affair. She blinked back at him lazily and yawned.

“Okay,” Linhardt muttered. It very likely wasn’t, but he didn’t really have the energy to do much of anything else.

Caspar leaned closer, his nose nearly brushing against his own.

“Does this mean that you’re my boyfriend?”

A grim voice inside Linhardt’s head noted that he really needed to help Caspar rearrange his priorities.

“....yes,” he supposed. Caspar grinned.

“Can I kiss you?”

“Yes,” Linhardt sighed. Caspar loomed ever closer.

“With _the teeth?_”

This was, Linhardt realized for the eight hundredth time, a very, _very_ bad idea.

“....Fine.”

* * *

“Holy shit,” Sylvain cribbed from Linhardt’s storytelling. “You are so screwed.” Linhardt groaned and turned his head so that his nose was smashed against the tabletop again.

“I am aware.”

“Edelgard is going to be _pissed_.”

“So be it.” She was always upset about something. That wasn’t really the problem.

“Still, I can’t say I’m surprised. I mean, isn’t that why you aren’t eating?”

“What,” Linhardt deadpanned into the table.

“Listen, I get it. Trust me. If anyone understands the complexities of monogamy it’s this guy.” Sylvain paused. “You’re not looking at me. Let the records show that I’m pointing at me. It’s me. I’m the guy.”

“Noted.”

Caspar most certainly wasn’t the reason why he wasn’t eating — well, not directly, at least. Just that he’d been so busy making sure he wasn’t _eaten_. Right? That was it. Wasn’t it? He was sure of it.

Absolutely. One hundred percent.

Or maybe ninety-seven. Ninety-six, at least.

“Where is he now?”

“Grocery shopping.” He slowly creaked his head to the side again. “I thought you said you brought food,” he added, this time with incrimination. Sylvain frowned.

“I did!” The incubus stalked over to the refrigerator to make his point. Linhardt eyed the barren shelves with bemusement. _Fucking idiot_. Although he supposed it was rather fitting that they’d all starve together up there on that stupid mountaintop.

“Well, whatever,” Sylvain huffed. “It’s not like I’m some expert. Unlike you I never was a human, now was I? Anyway, I think you ended your little story a bit too short.” He stalked back to the table and leered down at him lecherously. “What happened after all of that? Did he blow our your ba—”

“No.” Firstly, he hardly needed to be featured in Sylvain’s fantasies — if he even did that sort of thing, although Linhardt wasn’t so certain if that wouldn’t just somehow destroy Sylvain’s own wicked and no doubt dumb-looking soul in the process. Less importantly, _no_. Caspar had been more than content with a rather prolonged and very exploratory make-out session the night before. Afterwards he’d wanted nothing more than to cram together onto their offensively small bed, with which, when properly tucked against Linhardt’s side, he’d promptly fallen asleep. Linhardt was hardly the type of person to turn away the offer of a good night’s rest, particularly now that he was quite likely starving to death, but it had still been a bit unusual.

Of course it had been. Everything was unusual. It was an un-fucking-usual situation. He sighed. Sylvain laughed.

“Oh man. You’re so screwed,” he added again, this time smirking at the irony.

_Yes_, Linhardt thought, not bothering to waste the energy to answer; _I am indeed aware._

* * *

“Thanks so much for coming with me!”

“Of course,” Bernadetta chirped, mirroring the man’s bright smile. She liked this Caspar fellow. He was a little loud, but he certainly was nice. And, more importantly, Linhardt clearly liked him. This was strange, of course — they seemed to have little in common, and quite honestly she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a man go to bed with him and emerge none the worse for wear in the morning that came after. No matter how unusual, however, she supposed the reasoning was still clear: at last, and after so many years, she was finally going to have a little brother.

She’d already prepared no less than three dozen different activities for them to complete together once he’d come around. And surely with his sweet humor he’d be far more willing to call her _sister_ than Linhardt had ever allowed himself. Oh, she simply couldn’t wait. What fun it would be! 

“I know it’s a little early,” Caspar continued cheerily as they picked over the grocery store’s icy parking lot. “But I’m _starving_. I don’t think I can eat another lettuce sandwich.”

“I see,” Bernadetta replied, not entirely sure if he wasn’t speaking in some sort of mysterious code. Then again, she did find it rather difficult to keep up with slang. Caspar glanced at her for a moment before skipping forward to pull a shopping cart from a nearby corral. The store’s automatic doors squeaked open as they strode inside.

“What do you like to eat for breakfast?” She steadied her smile and did her best to hide a very quick and rather nervous scan of the aisles spread before them.

“Ah... soup? And condiments,” she added more confidently as she read the words off from one of the signs hanging above their heads.

“Er,” Caspar replied. “Sure.”

_Come on, Bernie_, she chided herself silently. _Get it together. You can do this._

“Well! And when I was younger, sometimes Mother would prepare warmed millet for me. Do you think they have any of that here?”

“Mill—I mean, right. Okay,” Caspar answered, “I guess we can check!”

“Wonderful!” She trailed behind him obediently as he entered into one of the aisles.

“So,” Caspar continued as he slowed the cart next to a tall wall of brightly-colored boxes. “You and Linhardt have known each other for a long time, right?”

“Yes. Ages, really.” She picked a box from the shelves and eyed the strange illustration on its front of a sharp-toothed creature hoarding over a bowl full of what appeared to be brown pebbles. “He’s like a father to me.”

“He does have a bit of an old soul,” Caspar agreed. She smiled and replaced the box. “You know, this is a little embarrassing, but I don’t even know how old he is.”

“Really?” She tapped her pointer finger against her lips. _Oh dear_. Well now, she certainly couldn’t tell him that she didn’t know Linhardt’s age moments after calling him her _father_ — but then again, it wasn’t like she could tell him the truth. Not yet, at least, although she had plenty of stories ready for him when he was more properly prepared.

_Right_, she coached, _think of a good age. Young, but not too young._ After all, he and Caspar hardly seemed like contemporaries (at the very least she’d never seen Linhardt wear a hooded sweatshirt, which seemed to be the only thing Caspar owned), and to look like that she supposed Caspar must have been in that thirteen-to-thirty demographic she’d read so much about. 

“Fifty... seven,” she told him finally. His lips twitched into a crooked smile. She decided this was a good sign and nodded for good measure. “He’s fifty-seven.”

“O...Okay,” said Caspar as he put a rainbow-colored box into the cart.

“And you met Fa—Linhardt at work, then?”

“Yeah! His desk is next to mine. He’s really helped me out a lot.”

“That sounds just like him,” she replied. It didn’t, really, but she’d always liked to imagine him as the helpful type. After all, he’d certainly helped her all of those years before.

“Say,” she added as they turned to approach a chilly hall full of cuts of meat wrapped in shiny plastic, “he can be a little gloomy sometimes, but watching you with him, I can see that you’ve really brightened him up.” Caspar turned a rather becoming shade of magenta as he worried over a slab of what she was relatively certain was bacon.

“I hope so,” he admittedly quietly. A wash of something pleasant settled over her shoulders. Yes. This was all so very lovely. What a wonderful family they would be.

After making a diligent effort to rustle up some millet from the grocery shelves (and to no avail), she and Caspar looped back towards Linhardt’s borrowed car. By that point they had fallen into a comfortable chatter about the flora and fauna common to places like their snow-capped destination. Bernadetta froze just as they spotted the sedan’s black hood.

“Wait,” she snapped suddenly, gripping at Caspar’s sleeve. He goggled at her with confusion, but she didn’t have time to address it — no, there it was again, that unmistakable smell, like bread left to mold and something that had been wet for far too long.

_Dammit._

_Werewolves._

And Father was always going on about how they weren’t a bother, but he never seemed to understand that they were only not a bother to creatures like _him_ — namely, things older than nation-states who had earned the right to be unafraid. She was built of far younger stuff, and that said nothing about the — well, however old he was, fourteen? Thirty-two? — man at her side.

“Caspar,” she told him in a whisper. “Let’s go back inside.”

“Huh?” He glanced across the parking lot with a crooked look. “Why? Did you forget something? I don’t want the ice cream to melt.” It didn’t seem much the weather for anything to melt, but she didn’t feel as though she was in the position to correct him. 

“Come on,” she insisted, nudging him towards whence they’d come. It was almost impressive how well rooted he was to the ground.

“Hold on, I — hey!” She grimaced as he peeked over the ruffle of her hair. “Dedue!”

Really? Was this really happening to her? And what in all of the heavens was a _dedue_?

“Hey,” Caspar laughed again. “What are you doing out here?” Bernadetta turned and bristled as she spotted her worst fear. Too late. There they were — Dimitri and Ingrid both, and accompanied by something she’d never seen before. Bernadetta frowned. Whatever it was, it was very old — older than maybe Edelgard, even.

_Oh dear. What a mess. No, no, no. _

“Caspar,” she begged him again, her voice squeaking more than she’d intended. “We really need to go inside.”

“Aw, just a second. That’s a friend of mine.” This friend was loping towards them, and with the wolves in tow (and no matter that they were two blondes wrapped up in shapeless jackets, she knew just what it was they truly were). _Shit shit shit._

_Think, Bernie, think!_

“Actually,” Caspar added in a conspiratorial whisper, “I think he’s dating my roommate, but don’t say anything about that.”

“Caspar,” the _dedue_ said. “You are here.” Caspar laughed.

“I am! So weird, right? Do you ski?”

“What are you doing here?” Dimitri had leveled the question in her direction. She stiffened, fighting the urge to dash away.

_No, no. Come on. You can do this. Be brave._

“Ah,” Caspar interjected, his head bobbing at he looked between them perplexedly.

“Shopping!” Bernadetta squeaked. “We’re shopping.” She supposed that Dimitri would have bared his teeth if he’d had chance.

“Do you know each other, too?” She glanced over at Caspar’s question.

“Y-yes,” she stumbled. “In a way.”

“Wow!” Caspar grinned. “What a crazy coincidence! Well, hi there!” The hulking sentinel at Dimitri’s side frowned slightly, perhaps realizing that there’d been some breach in etiquette and with him the guilty party.

“Caspar,” he began flatly, “this is my... _friend_ Dimitri. And Ingrid. Another friend.”

“Nice to meet you! Gosh, this is nuts!” Bernadetta winced. Dimitri scowled. Caspar laughed nervously. “I... ah... Are you staying someplace nearby?”

“Yes,” Dedue answered. “In the woods.”

_Oh my god._ What a disaster. Linhardt was going to kill her.

“How nice,” she sputtered. “Well, do have a nice time then — so nice to meet you. Er. I mean. To _see_ you. Caspar, why don’t we—”

“Do you want to eat breakfast with us?” Caspar’s question boomed in her ears. _Oh no._

“That would be lovely,” Ingrid answered smoothly and with a toothy smile.

_Oh no. Please. Not that._

“Awesome! That’s okay, right?” Her voice jumbled in her throat as she realized Caspar was looking in her direction. “I mean, we have plenty of food.”

“O-of course.” Caspar kept on smiling.

“Great!”

“It is cold,” Dedue offered, stepping forward towards the cart. “Please. Go start the car. We will load the groceries.”

“Ah, no, that’s okay,” Caspar answered. “You don’t need to do that.”

“Please,” Dimitri insisted. “After all, you’ve been so generous already. The least we can do is help with the bags.”

“Well,” Caspar wavered. “Alright. I guess I can start the heater. Thanks so much!”

“I’ll g-go with you,” Bernadetta offered before Dimitri’s cold stare stopped her short. “A-after I make sure we didn’t miss anything!”

“Okay! Sounds like a plan!” Caspar bumped his fist in the air before jogging towards the car. He slipped twice but managed it relatively unscathed. Bernadetta sighed before remembering with whom she’d been left behind.

“Gah!” Dimitri was suddenly very close and very angry.

“Linhardt gave me his word that Caspar von Bergliez would be safe,” the werewolf snarled. “What is he doing here and with the likes of _you_?”

“W-what?”

“Tell me! What are Edelgard’s plans for him?”

“Edelgard?” _Come on, Bernie. Be brave. He’s not going to hurt you. Probably._ “It d-doesn’t have anything to do with Edelgard. There’s...it’s...He c-came with Linhardt.” Dimitri made a wordless noise that seemed neither calm nor understanding. 

“That bastard told me he wasn’t going to eat him!”

“E-eat him?!” She braced herself into a brave(r) pose. “He’s not going to eat him! H-he’s going to t-turn him!”

“_What_? That’s even worse!” She scowled.

“And what d-do you mean by that?” She might have been afraid, but that didn’t mean she was going to let him say something like that, the mangy old dog. 

Caspar honked impatiently from across the lot. The four of them lingered for a final stare-off before they came to the collective realization that nothing could be done with glares alone.

“You’re not getting away with this,” Dimitri huffed as he turned on his heel. Ingrid offered Bernadetta a bitter stare of her own before following after him towards the car.

“Let us not be left behind,” the towering man told her afterwards, gripping at the cart to slowly push it where the rest had gone.

Bernadetta understood that nothing would get better, not even if she ran, and so she balled her fingers into fists and followed behind.

* * *

Caspar had made two discoveries in his early-morning trip to the grocery store.

_**Discovery number one**_: Bernadetta was definitely a vampire.

_**Discovery number two**_: It was going to be incredibly difficult to keep his promise to Linhardt about not revealing what he knew.

The bit about Dedue and his strange friends was perhaps almost a discovery in of itself, but of what he wasn’t yet certain. What he also knew, however, was that he was properly ravenous by the time he’d pulled up into the chalet’s drive, and moreover very eager to turn the cartons of eggs he’d bought with Linhardt’s very fancy looking credit card into his famous mushroom and spinach omelets. This was going to happen, and even if all of them were somehow vampires or something crazy like that, and therefore even if he had to eat them all by himself.

The omelets, that is. Not the people.

Well. The vampires.

Potentially.

Anyway, he clearly wasn’t going to eat them, and no matter what _they_ were — that was the important part.

“What are you doing here,” the woman named Ladislava ordered from the heights of the lodge’s stairs as they tumbled out from the car. This struck him as a bit unusual, given that it was the same thing that Dimitri had said as well. Then again, he was hungry. He decided this still took precedence. Dedue seemed to be of the same mind, and accompanied him to the trunk to begin to stack a very impressive collection of bags into his arms.

No wonder Ashe liked him. He was definitely getting an extra serving.

They trudged up the stairs together while Ladislava and Dimitri shared what sounded like a very mean conversation. Caspar was too preoccupied with trying to remember if he’d bought butter to listen. Yes. Butter, cheese, and garlic too — it was going to be _delicious_.

He was quite devastated, therefore, when they finally made it to the kitchen and found it rather crowded.

“Excuse me,” Dedue said politely as he wrestled with his many bulging bags. Lysithea didn’t answer, apparently too focused on Sylvain’s current show of balancing a set of paper cups on Linhardt’s head. A perhaps overly-protective spark of something close to anger glimmered in Caspar’s stomach as he wormed his way closer to the kitchen table that Linhardt had turned into a bed.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Sylvain snapped, looking far too guilty to be honest. He quickly snatched away the cups and tossed them into the sink before offering Caspar a smile. Caspar frowned and heaved his bags onto the table. Linhardt twitched slightly in his sleep but otherwise endeavored on.

It was becoming readily apparent that omelets were not in his future.

“What is _he_ doing?”

“Just takin’ a nap,” Sylvain offered breezily.

“He is needing to be eating,” the woman named Petra chimed in at the same time. Felix coughed. Caspar felt a very angry stormcloud gathering in his chest. He wasn’t certain just what exactly was going on, but he did know that Linhardt had slept throughout the night, and as drowsy a man as he was, the current situation appeared to be the result of something more complicated than simple sleepiness. Moreover, it hardly seemed to be something to be resolved with paper cups — or breakfast, unfortunately for him.

Oh.

_Oh._

Well. Perhaps not _his_ breakfast, at least.

“Okay, enough,” Caspar grumped as he stomped around the table to Linhardt’s chair. They all watched on with trepidation as Caspar linked his arms under his and carefully leveraged him over his shoulder.

“Mrmf,” said Linhardt.

“Huh,” observed Felix, bemused.

“Ah, Cas,” Sylvain intervened as Caspar pivoted towards the door. “I don’t know if that’s a great idea.”

“It’s fine,” he muttered, readjusting his grip as he tried to remember which hallway would take them closest to the stairs.

“Caspar,” Randolph added more sternly.

“It’s fine!” He wasn’t sure what else he could say without breaking Linhardt’s promise and so he stumbled more quickly forward instead, his arms beginning to burn as he finally found the stairs and started to summit them. The front door swung open just as he made it to the top. Dimitri’s growling voice filled the heights of the foyer. Caspar ran inside their room before whatever _that_ was distracted them.

Next he plopped Linhardt onto the bed (_‘spar_, Linhardt complained without opening his eyes). Then he stood beside it, his hands planted at his hips, and did his best to think back on all of the hundreds of horror movie hours he’d watched to devise a plan on just how it was that he was going to get Linhardt to drink his blood.

“Mrrow,” Desdemona encouraged him from her dark lair beneath the bed.

Caspar nodded.

_Right._


	8. Interlude II — Four Sugars, Plenty of Cream

“Your stalker is here.”

Ferdinand glanced up from the glossy pages of his magazine to sneak a glimpse of the familiar crown of dark hair bobbing between the cafe’s tables.

“He isn’t my _stalker_, Hilda,” he corrected her primly. “Won’t you please try to behave?” Hilda cracked her gum — pink, like her hair, and both of them positively garish — and blew it into an impressive bubble._Honestly_. They may not have been at _Chez Louise_, but the cafe was still an eatery. She really had no decency.

“Just...” he attempted, failing thereafter and conceding to comb a hand through his hair. “Two coffees, if it wouldn’t be a bother.”

“Everything you do is a bother,” she grumbled. Still, Hilda was very much employed by the Enbarr Country Club and so she relented, turning her back to him as she fiddled with the coffee machine. He too, of course, shared the same employer, but his role as an instructor — as so proven by the profile of him they’d included on their website under _Staff_, and with a picture, even, whereas Hilda’s department was simply labeled _Dining Options_ with a number to call for parties six and more— allowed him to be bossy, if only in this very particular circumstance.

“Listen,” Hilda said to him as she leveled two cardboard cups in his direction. “Eventually this guy is going to graduate from scoping you out to sticking you in his trunk. And guess what happens after that?” She mimed a very over-the-top impersonation of what he supposed was meant to be him suffocating. “They always go to coworkers first as possible suspects — the police, that is. You think I want to get sucked into that?”

“I do believe you’ve been watching too much television.” She rolled her eyes.

“Sure, you say that now, but who’s going to be the one who’s laughing when you’re in some pit in his basement and he’s telling you to lotion up?”

“None of that seems terribly funny to me.”

“Him!” She tossed her arms with exasperation. “Is the answer to that question. So. Here. Listen. Let’s use a safe word. If you ever manage to come to your senses, why don’t you try yelling out.. oh, I don’t know... _Help, Hilda! You were, as usual, completely right!_”

“Yes, let’s do that,” he sighed as he took the cups from her. “Thank you, Hilda.”

She popped her gum at him as he made his retreat towards the milk and sugar waiting for him at a nearby banquette. Ferdinand plucked four sugar packets from its neat display and did his best to ignore Hilda’s ham-fisted warning. She was always so overly dramatic — and he was a man who appreciated a well-trained thespian more that your average fellow, so that was certainly saying something.

Still, he supposed he appreciated her concern. And yes, he would have to acquiesce that Hubert did cast quite the image with all of his dark sweaters and delightfully dour expressions. But there was something just so wonderfully _Old Hollywood_ about him, and no matter if he would have been perpetually typecast as mustache-twirling villains. Ferdinand could still appreciate his certain _je ne sais quoi_, and it made no difference to him if Hilda decided to describe it with her usual pedestrian panache.

_Right_, he reassured himself as he poured a generous splash of cream into his coffee; and since when did he need anyone’s blessing to make a friend? Or, well, whatever the right word was for what he was timidly looking for when they had their little coffee dates — and, well, no, they weren’t _dates_, of course, something more of a coincidence, really. But the fact that he just so happened to take his break at the same time that Hubert’s Saturday morning golfing lessons came to an end was absolutely innocent. And, moreover, it was only to be expected that one would drink coffee at such an hour, and there was hardly any reason for them to do it _alone_.

Ferdinand cleared his throat and turned to casually walk in Hubert’s direction. He was sitting in his usual spot at a little table shoved into the far corner of the room, which might have been objectively the worst seat in the house but had become quite alluring to him over the past few weeks. His coffee-time companion was currently busying himself with a paperback book, and with what Ferdinand hoped was the same inattention as he had been staring at that magazine earlier.

_Don’t be stingy_, he chided himself silently as he picked his way between a table of blue-haired octogenarians; _there’s nothing wrong with him enjoying his book_. To be honest, Ferdinand would have been content to simply sit beside him as he read — and better if it was in some rose garden than in the sleepy country club cafe. Yes, he could nearly smell the perfume of those velvety petals as he imagined it: and them sharing a platter of cucumber sandwiches as they lounged on twin chaises, both taking turns to admire the neat trim of the nearby topiaries as the morning ticked onwards into an afternoon filled with croquet.

Or something like that. _Hypothetically speaking_.

“Good morning, Hubert,” he greeted him once he’d finally intercepted his table. Hubert glanced up measuredly from the pages of his book.

“Ferdinand,” he replied.

“Care for some coffee?” Hubert nodded, first at him and then at the chair beside him, and in exactly the same way that he had done for the past four Saturdays in a row. And maybe some would have found this routine rather trite, but for Ferdinand there was nothing better thanpredictability. After all, he loved above all other things a sense of loyalty in a man.

He handed him his coffee — black, naturally — as he took his seat. Hubert closed his book and set it neatly to the side.

“How did your lessons go?”

“Serviceably,” Hubert answered. Ferdinand smiled at him. This was probably an overstatement. He’d heard firsthand from Hubert’s instructor that the man was a hopeless golfer. Apparently he’d been instructed to take up sport to bolster his aspirations for middle management, but although he’d been diligent with his lessons it didn’t seem as though he had the proper finesse. _He has no endurance_, is what his instructor had really said, as well as _he’s frightened all of the caddies_, but that was neither here nor there. Ferdinand sipped at his drink.

“And yours?”

“Oh,” Ferdinand tittered, “more of the same, as always. Maureen never practices and then expects me to somehow correct her absolutely terrible excuse for a serve. Not that we spend much time on the court.” Poor Maureen was deep in the throes of her fourth divorce and had decided to use him more as a therapist than a tennis instructor; not that he was going to tell Hubert that, of course. He wasn’t the type to kiss and tell. Or, well, not _kiss_ — goodness, where was his mind today — just that he appreciated the idea of discretion.

He cleared his throat and took another drink.

“And work?” Hubert nodded at his question.

“Everything is going according to plan.” Most would have misinterpreted this as something nefarious, but Ferdinand knew that he simply meant his workshop on effective emailing had been a success.

“Excellent news!” Hubert nodded and nursed his coffee. Ferdinand wasn’t entirely convinced that he’d ever seen him actually drink the stuff, but he seemed content to warm his long, pale, graceful fingers against it. He watched him do this very thing now and perhaps allowed his mind to wander for a very brief snippet of time.

“Ferdinand,” Hubert began after a moment of silence. “I... I was wondering if perhaps you were available this evening.” Ferdinand valiantly choked down a mouthful of coffee.

“A-available?” He cleared his throat as gracefully as possible. “This evening? Why, yes. My last lesson is at four o’clock. Is there something that I could help you with?”

He cringed internally with all of the ferocity of a collapsing star as Hubert’s mouth twitched into what could have been interpreted as a frown. _Something I could help you with_, what sort of line was that? Surely he could have prepared something far more intriguing, or at least infinitesimally more _coquettish_.

“No,” Hubert replied flatly. “But I have come upon a pair of tickets to tonight’s performance of _The Lady and the Light_ and I though that perhaps you would be interested in accompanying me.”

Ferdinand gripped his cup tightly enough that the lid popped free with a soul-crushing _pwoofp!_

“Well,” he replied with a perhaps over-engineered version of what he imagined it sounded like to play it cool, “I think that would be lovely.”

“Good.”

“Good,” Ferdinand echoed. They both glanced down at their cups and sat wordlessly together for quite a long time.

“What the hell is wrong with you,” Hilda asked him later once Hubert had said his farewells with a promise to pick him up at six, and _oh my God, he’d given him his number_.

“He’s invited me to the opera,” Ferdinand breathed. Hilda rolled her eyes.

“Jesus Christ.” She planted her hands on her hips and eyed him icily. “He’s going to turn you into a lampshade, you know.”

“Yes,” he answered distractedly. And whatever was he going to _wear_?

* * *

Ferdinand stared listlessly into his closet and decided he needed another glass of wine.

It was a small miracle that he lived so close to the country club. Even with that in consideration, however, one and a half hours was hardly enough time to make himself presentable. First had come the task of uncorking a bottle of Chardonnay (not terribly seasonable given the chill in the air, but one was sometimes faced with insurmountable obstacles such as a threadbare wine collection), a glass of which he’d quickly downed to settle his nerves before rushing through a shower. Glass number two had accompanied an abridged skin care regimen regretfully deplete of the full mask he so desperately required, but which at least met the bare minimum of addressing the unsightly redness of his cheeks and the slight puffiness of his eyes. He’d enjoyed a third as he worked through the complicated process of blowdrying his hair, and now had finished off the bottle as he eyed his collection of cashmere sweaters with a substantial amount of dread.

“Come on, Ferdinand,” he tutted to himself. “Pull yourself together.”

He’d already discarded two button-up shirts on his bed (too stuffy) as well as a handsome cardigan that he’d been dismayed to find had been set upon by moths (the brutes).Naturally he was of the mind to pay the theatre the respect it was due, but even he wasn’t earnest enough about the whole matter to overestimate the formality of their little town (after all, the esteemed venue was next door to a kebab shop, for goodness’ sake).

That meant that a sharp, classic suit was absolutely out of the question. He wasn’t a monster, so of course he’d still wear a jacket — and maybe that navy blazer there with the patterning underneath the cuffs — but what on earth would he wear beneath? And the slacks? And the _shoes?_

“Bugger.” His eyes drifted to his wristwatch and nearly rolled from their sockets when he realized that he had but fifteen minutes left. With much consternation, he reluctantly settled on a thick-knitted white sweater and a pair of handsome navy slacks along with their matching jacket. He selected a belt next that he hoped wouldn’t push the ensemble from sophisticated-casual towards the pitfalls of try-hard dunce.

His camel peacoat would be a proper end to the ensemble, he decided last, and would at least cover any missteps he’d made along the way. He slipped his feet into a pair of cognac-colored oxfords for the coup de grace and sighed. And better if he’d had another glass of wine, but there was the glow of Hubert’s headlights in the window and _just be natural, Ferdinand. You’re charming. You’re sophisticated. You are, at the very least, bathed and fully dressed._

Hubert’s sedan was black, as was his outfit, which looked as though it had been borrowed from the world’s most fashionable stagehand. Ferdinand did his best to acknowledge all of this will a cool air of indifference which might have read a bit more red-faced than he’d intended. To his credit Hubert was charmingly quiet as well, which at least seemed to answer that mean little question lingering in the back of Ferdinand’s mind which called out, _wait a minute, is this really a date?_

It was only when they’d sidled up to the theatre’s stately bar that he realized the last thing he’d eaten was a half-hearted lunch too many hours before. He decided to order a martini, figuring that the olives therein would at least count as some sort of _amuse bouche_, and summoned whatever winestained charm he had left as he turned a fresh smile in Hubert’s direction.

“I hear that Manuela Casagranda is absolutely divine,” he offered in prediction of the show that was to follow in an hour’s time. Hubert nodded.

“Yes, although she is no Suzanne Lautrec.” Ferdinand scoffed.

“Lautrec? Surely you jest. She has nothing on Casagranda’s range!’

“It’s not simply about range,” Hubert contended.

“It is all about range!” Ferdinand insisted as he drained his glass. The bartender eyed him for a moment before freshening it for him.

“Ferdinand, don’t be a fool,” his companion tutted and yes, maybe it was rude, but my goodness, how nice it was to hear him say his name. He plucked another olive from his glass and liked to imagine that Hubert didn’t overlook the way he neatly parted it from the spear of its pick with his teeth.

The third martini was a mistake. It didn’t seem so at the time: quite frankly, he felt positively bewitching as he regaled Hubert with a clever story about Hilda refilling the cafes’ salt shakers with sugar, and was only further encouraged by the rare rumble of laughter that his storytelling won from his austere counterpart (and not once but twice!).

And yes, the world did tilt and twirl quite fancifully as they finally stood from the bar to find their seats, but he was a professional — athlete, not drinker, although he was aware in the moment it was difficult to tell; and alright, so perhaps he wasn’t an athlete, but at the very least he had some sense of balance — and so he managed it well enough.

The seats were exceptional. Hubert, he discovered, looked fantastic in the dark. And Manuela Casagranda was utterly transformed in her role as heroine — a warrior-turned-queen serving at the side of a tortured empress featuring a striking head of white hair — and, just as he’d promised, her ability to dance from soprano to baritone was a dream. In the second scene, however, Ferdinand realized that he had to squint one eye closed to stop seeing in double and in the third, when Casagrande sang a swooping soliloquy about the death of her father, he was horrified to realize that he was quite possibly crying.

This, of course, meant that he’d unwittingly unearthed his _Bonafide Childhood Trauma_ with his drinking instead of unlocking his charm. Scene four was spent fully dedicated to pulling himself together. The intermission found him having utterly failed.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, of course,” he slurred unconvincingly as they made their way into the lobby. By then he supposed he was lurching about, but that was less important than his futile efforts at stuffing all of his very sticky feelings back into his chest. Hubert frowned and steered him towards a set of benches left forgotten next to what appeared to be an out-of-order restroom. He sat: not because wanted to, but because he supposed he had to — and better that he did than topple over, after all.

“What is it?” Ferdinand glanced glumly in direction of the handsome black smudge in his whirled vision that he imagined was Hubert.

“Nothing,” he insisted, fluttering his fingers at him. “‘S’nothing.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Are-you-enjoying-show?” came his next machine-gun reply. Hubert’s blur moved with what might have been a shrug.

“Honestly, I find it a little difficult to empathize with the queen, although the empress is well done.” He paused. Somewhere nearby another patron squawked with laughter. Ferdinand funneled a not-inconsequential amount of energy into keeping his head upright.

“You’re nice,” Ferdinand blabbered before he could catch himself.

“Er?”

“You’re very nice,” he doubled down. “You’re a very nice man.”

“That isn’t something I hear often,” Hubert admitted with a very stony rendition of a chuckle.

“Wha-at? That’s pro...per...preposterous. I think that... I think that people sometimes think that I am a fool.” _Oh no,_ a tiny voice cried out: _what are you doing?!_ “And I know why, you know? I know why. I mean, Hubert,” he added in a near-whisper, dipping his shoulders towards the Hubert-colored space beside him, “I’m not... I’m not even very good at tennis.”

Hubert laughed again. It was quiet, but it was nice.

“But I’d much rather be doing that,” he continued on, emboldened by the sound, “than be a bad man, you know?” He waved his finger at him. “Take my father, right? He was a bloody bastard. A real goddamned monster. Eustace von Aegir was his name — you ever heard of him?” He didn’t pause for an answer. It really didn’t matter. He was now fully committed to his doomed monologue. “He was in politics, but don’t ask me what he did to ever help anyone. Just lined his pockets — but money didn’t save him in the end, now did it? That’s the thing... That’s the big goddamned thing. Doesn’t matter if you’re rich when you get what’s coming to you. And so I’d rather be a fool, right?”

Hubert’s inky swirl didn’t answer. Ferdinand’s heart dove from his chest into the soles of his well-polished shoes.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, dragging his fingers through his hair. He froze as he felt the weight of Hubert’s hand against his shoulder.

“You know,” he heard him say, “I hated my father, too.”

Ferdinand understood that such a phrase was hardly romantic, but in that moment it was. He laughed and shook his head and did his best not to careen forward off the bench.

“I’m afraid I’ve had a bit too much to drink,” he admitted next.

“You didn’t seem so terribly good at it before.”

“And yet one must endeavor on,” Ferdinand sighed. The lobby lights flickered to signal the second act. He watched them with bemusement. Hubert seemed to catch on.

“Let’s get some air. I am no doubt a single one of Casagranda’s arias away from a migraine.”

“Oh,” Ferdinand huffed as he reluctantly stood, “and what do you know about arias?”

“More than Manuela,” Hubert contended as they slowly made their way to the door.

“Preposterous,” Ferdinand said again.

It was cold outside. He used this excuse — paired with the far more believable likelihood of him falling over — to string his arm through the crook of Hubert’s elbow. Hubert stiffened slightly at the move but didn’t shrug him away, and so Ferdinand decided that this would be his singular victory for the evening.

And maybe he said more charming things or, more likely, more damning ones, but their stroll through the city streets gobbled up the last crumbs of the six olives that had made up his dinner. The night was then blotted into a series of half-memories (his own laughter, brassy and loud, and Hubert’s far more measured version; a greasy basket of fries that he failed to share; the sweet leather smell of Hubert’s car) that ended in his bed.

Alone, that is, which might have been disappointing in any other circumstances. Ferdinand woke slowly and with a groan, kneading his temples as he peeked timidly at the sunlight streaming through his drapes. His room was cool and quiet and exactly as he’d left it — there was, he noted dully, the empty Chardonnay bottle on his desk — updated only by the half-folded remnants of his outfit from the night before. He palmed his chest and was bemused to find himself dressed in a pair of flannel pajamas that were mis-buttoned but otherwise in one piece.

“Ferdinand,” he sighed hoarsely to himself, “you are such an idiot.”

He groaned again as he turned onto his side. He’d meant to fall back asleep but was distracted by a little shape lurking at his bedside table. He squinted at it — yes, there, it was a... a cup? He inched closer and groped in its direction.

A coffee cup indeed, and somehow still warm to the touch. Ferdinand balanced it carefully as he sat up to inspect it more closely. As he did his eyes settled on a sheet of paper left behind on the table as well.

_Thank you for a lovely evening,_ the paper said.

He tipped the cup tentatively to his lips (and perhaps Hilda would have chided him for it, but what on earth did she know) and smiled when he found it sweet, just the way he liked it: four sugars, plenty of cream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, ‘goyles and boils, I finally slipped up and made myself a Twitter account to lovingly look at Fire Emblem fanart for the remainder of my earthly years. I’ll be posting little tidbits about my fics and Linhardt and Linhardt-adjacent doodles there, and would love to connect with y’all! 
> 
> I’m @fouxdogue, so please come casphardt around with me :3


	9. Mouth Stuff

One might wonder, given their observation of Linhardt’s behavior to the present point, if vampires dream. It is no doubt a worthy question, and one needs only to look to other creatures plucked from the vast and decorated branches of the animal kingdom to find evidence for both sides of such a hypothesis. There are dogs, for instance, who are known to scamper and howl in their sleep; and surely dolphins must dream up memories of their favorite fish; and elephants, with their own strange, long-nosed language — dreamers, all of them, no doubt.

But then one might consider crawfish, or earthworms, or mosquitos, even — and then perhaps one would ask the question, well, has anyone ever seen them _sleep_, let alone dream? And what on earth would an earthworm dream about, anyways?

As it so happens, in this instance Linhardt and the rest of his toothy brethren had far more in common with an earthworm than with a man. Perhaps dreaming was just another one of those chips bartered in exchange for immortality — after all, when one could live to an age innumerable, whatever was the point in dreaming? They simply had to _do_, with the occasional exception.

That wasn’t to say that Linhardt didn’t enjoy sleeping. On the contrary, it was divine — to calm his mind into nothingness, a blank black page free of all of the bother facing him in his daily life? Exceptional. Many vampires did away with the habit of sleeping but he’d always maintained a bed in his countless abodes, and always one filled with the finest down.

Of course, without the ticker-tape of dreaming to keep count of your hours slept it is very easy to loose track of time. For Linhardt in particular, this was only made worse by his occasional picky eating (and one must note that, them being immortal, a vampire cannot starve to death; but, not unlike a cellphone, they will lose their usefulness if left uncharged — or, put in more relevant terms, will fall like some macabre Sleeping Beauty very much asleep).

He was usually careful about that sort of thing, but even he occasionally made mistakes. His last misstep had cost him the greater part of the twentieth century, which he had spent slumbering in a rather charming little place he’d made for himself in a country that had been called one thing when he’d tucked himself in and something entirely different when he’d finally woken up.

Waking in general was a bit of an unusual experience as well. After all, it’s quite disorienting to fall into a deep and dreamless slumber only to snap back into present consciousness again. Such a thing is tricky enough when it occurs in the form of a post-Thanksgiving nap, but imagine the complexities created when one wakes covered in cobwebs and speaking a language long made dead.

In the handful of times that Linhardt had fallen asleep in that sort of way, he’d never before been roused by the feeling of something warm and slightly spongy in his mouth. This was his first warning, to be clear, that perhaps it was better to keep his eyes closed. But then his waking mind had slowly remembered flashes of whatever day it had been that had come before he’d fallen asleep — and these memories starting with waking, ironically enough, and staring into a forest of blue hair; and then watching with unease as his sedan peeled away from the frosty drive, narrowly missing a strip of trees; and then Sylvain’s sweatpantsed erection, for some ungodly reason — and a little voice inside him had told him that maybe, just maybe, he needed to wake up.

Another voice, late to the party and sounding a bit drunk, yelled out _oh my, delicious!_

“Ah,” said Caspar, although Linhardt felt his voice more than heard it — and it was in that moment that he realized that the rush of water he’d heard tinkling in the background wasn’t some nearby waterfall heretofore gone unnoticed but in fact the man’s pulse drumming millimeters from his ear.

His eyes flashed open and filled with the grey of Caspar’s stupid sweatshirt.

“Er,” Caspar said.

Linhardt recoiled from his spot crumped up against the broader-shouldered man’s broad shoulders and grunted as he smacked his head against the — what the hell was that — a... _headboard_? And what in the _ever-loving_—

“Caspar,” he snapped, “please... _please_ tell me you weren’t putting things into my mouth again.”

Caspar rubbed guiltily at a very suspicious pink spot at the corner of his throat.

“Caspar!” His blue eyes widened as Linhardt shook him by the shoulders. “You can’t just — you could have gotten hurt! What the hell were you thinking?”

“I just—”

“Thinking,” Linhardt scoffed, scrubbing his palms across his face, “well, that’s just the problem, isn’t it? God forbid you think about something before you just go and do it, isn’t that right?” Caspar’s lips puckered into a pouting frown.

“Hey, now, wai—”

“I knew this was a bad idea,” Linhardt continued brusquely.

“Lin—”

“Don’t,” he stopped him, making a move to crawl forward off the bed and doing his best to ignore the blurry edges that everything had taken on. “Just. _Don’t_. Alright?”

Caspar _did_, of course, his maddeningly strong little fingers gripping Linhardt by the arm.

“Lin, listen to me.”

“No. I’ve already done far too much of that already. Come on. Get up.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m taking you home,” Linhardt told him as he lurched further forward and very nearly made it to his feet before Caspar drew him back. “_Don’t_.”

“I’m not going home!”

“You are!” Caspar dove towards him, his eyes screwed closed — oh, for fuck’s sake, him and his whole hypnotization fixation, as if Linhardt even had the energy for something like that — as he hugged Linhardt’s arms tight against his side.

“Stop it,” Linhardt huffed hotly, but of course it was too late, and already they were both tumbling sideways and soon after slumping off from the bed entirely, a tangle of limbs as Linhardt found himself folded at a near-perfect ninety degree angle beneath Caspar’s bulk.

“Cas-par!”

“I don’t want you to die!”

_What?!_

“What?” Linhardt squirmed sideways until his was face-to-face with him — eye-to-eye, so to speak, except for the fact that Caspar had decided to keep his closed. His blue cotton-candy eyebrows knitted tight together as Linhardt took his chin between his hands. “What did you just say?”

“I... don’twannayoudie,” Caspar mumbled, peeking open one of his eyes before quickly shuttering it again. Linhardt sighed — a deep, drawn out thing that must have emptied out the last stale breath he’d taken two-thousand six hundred and thirty-two years prior.

“And just where on earth did you get that idea?” Caspar’s azure caterpillars inched slowly apart. “Caspar. Open your eyes.”

“No.”

“Honestly,” Linhardt groaned. “Listen. I promise that I’m not going to hypnotize you.” Caspar only squeezed his eyelids tighter closed and never before, Linhardt realized, had he ever met someone so stubborn — and he’d had quite a few dealings with the Catholic Church when it had been at its most overzealous, so that was certainly saying something. “Please look at me.”

Caspar finally obeyed. Linhardt was fairly certain that he saw a shower of glitter and stardust and heart-shaped lights tumble from his lashes and, as if Caspar were some children’s show Medusa, Linhardt then realized that he was already doomed and fully petrified, although this time less out of stone than out of a very inconvenient fuzzy feeling.

He really should have just eaten him when he’d had the chance.

“Cas,” he sighed defeatedly, “I’m not going to die.”

“But Petra said—”

“Let’s just cut that short and assume that whatever she said was lost in translation.”

“So why is it that you look like you’re about to faint?” _Well, because I am, old chap_, he could have said next, but as if he was going to give Caspar the satisfaction of being right. 

“I might be a little...peckish,” Linhardt admitted as he glanced away. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

As he said this aloud he realized just how absurd his excuse sounded. If he hadn’t been so caught up in the rising tide of his embarrassment — or the full tempest of his empty stomach; or the dawning realization of how nice it felt to have Caspar tumbled atop him, and him smelling like that cheap aftershave he used which had, for some unreasonable notion, become quite alluring lately — he might have noticed the swell of some sort of argument building downstairs. But he didn’t, instead focusing on stringing a coherent sentence together even with his mind sputtering the way it was.

“What? Of course it has something to do with me,” Caspar insisted with a huff. “Don’t tell me that you’re going to go out and suck _somebody else’s_ blood.”

“Of course I am,” Linhardt deadpanned; and well, yes, objectively it made sense, and no matter that he’d been dragging his feet about it. Caspar’s cheeks burned bright.

“No way!”

“Excuse me?”

“We’re dating!” Caspar insisted this point with such indignation that Linhardt briefly forgot what the word meant. “You know, _exclusive_!”

“That’s hardly the same thing.”

“Uh, yes it is,” Caspar puffed. “You’re gonna go out and flirt with somebody else and then do mouth stuff with them—” Linhardt’s lips cricked into a smile that he immediately regretted.

“_Mouth stuff_, Caspar, that’s not really—”

“But that’s what you’d do, right?” To be honest, he was a rather observant man.

“Well,” Linhardt managed thinly, “there are a variety of ways to... Listen to me. This is what I meant when I said it’s important to keep our lives separate. Don’t you see? The things that I must do to survive — naturally they would be abhorrent to someone like you.”

“That’s not what I said at all!”

“It’s what you should be saying,” Linhardt told him with another sigh, and this one leaving him feeling more properly miserable. “I’m sorry that I’ve involved you in it as much as I have already. It isn’t fair.” He meant to say more, but was caught off guard when Caspar suddenly knocked their foreheads together. “_Blawgh_,” Linhardt stuttered rather indelicately. “What are you _doing_—”

“I’m not gonna let you break up with me,” Caspar told him, snubbing their noses together.

“Caspar—”

“Nope!” Linhardt’s shoulders sagged into the carpet.

“Then it appears that we are at an impasse.”

“No,” Caspar contended. “You’re gonna drink my blood.”

“Absolutely not,” Linhardt hissed.

“Yep!”

“Not _yep_.” Linhardt gripped his collar and hauled him back until he could look him more properly in the eye. “It would _kill_ you, Caspar. I’m not going to do that.”

“Oh,” Caspar countered, the realization finally filling his gaze. _For goodness’ sake_. “Well,” he continued, his face screwing into a thoughtful shape, “can’t you just...not?”

“Excuse me?”

“Just not kill me,” he replied with a shrug. “Like... have an appetizer instead of a full meal?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“You know,” Caspar insisted more excitedly. “I bet you usually just drain your... _them_ dry, don’t you?” Linhardt scowled. Honestly, did he have to put it like that? How indecent.

“Yes,” he muttered glumly. “That is the idea.”

“Well, just don’t, with me. Would that work? It’s like... a blood drive, right?” Linhardt stared at him blankly.

“...a blood drive.”

“Yeah! I mean, they take whole bag fulls, right? That has to be enough.” He squeezed Linhardt’s flat stomach as if this somehow proved his point. Linhardt briefly considered making another attempt at turning into a bat.

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” he argued.

“Why not? I mean, okay, so maybe you have to do it more often, or something, but I don’t mind!”

“You say it like you’ve done it before.” Caspar laughed.

“I guess it might hurt a little,” he acquiesced with another shrug, “but it’s alright if it’s you.” Linhardt frowned.

“Caspar...” A very heavy feeling settled in his chest. “Why are you like this?” The man’s face fell at the question.

“Huh?”

“Why are you so... nice to me?” This next question came out a bit more cringing than he had intended, but so be it, he supposed. Caspar’s cheeks turned pink.

“Well,” he mumbled, “because I like you.”

“Why?” Caspar laughed again.

“I dunno. You’ve always been so nice to me.” He fiddled with the hem of Linhardt’s shirt, his eyes downcast. “And you help me out without me even asking, and you never want anything in return. And you’ve never called me dumb... well, except for today, that is.” His eyes darted back upwards in Linhardt’s direction.

“I don’t think you’re dumb,” Linhardt quickly corrected, and with a stern tone that told him that he was telling him the truth. “...I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Caspar bounced his shoulders again. “I get it. I’ve always been.... _different_, you know? From everybody else. When I was younger it made me feel really alone. But you don’t make me feel different. Or maybe it’s just that we’re both different, I don’t know. Whatever it is, I like it.” Linhardt’s left hand rubbed an absentminded circle across one of Caspar’s thighs before he had the chance to stop himself. “And you’re the prettiest guy I’ve ever seen.”

“I am _not_ pretty,” Linhardt shot back dryly, his charmed silence defeated by such a preposterous idea. Caspar laughed.

“You definitely are. Like, gorgeous.”

“_Caspar_.”

“So do it!” Caspar chomped Linhardt’s wrist to perhaps accentuate his point — and Linhardt would have been annoyed, of course, if maybe it hadn’t been him. He sighed.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Sure you can.” Caspar leaned backwards, his eyes tipped towards the ceiling as he strategized. “What if... what if we time it?”

“Time what?”

“Uh,” Caspar replied, his perpetual blush deepening, “the, er, sucking.” For some reason Linhardt suddenly felt bashful himself which was, of course, ridiculous. “Listen. Two years ago I went to Horrorcon, right? And I dressed up like — you remember _The Devil’s Bride_, that movie I told you about yesterday? Anyway, I dressed up like Father Ophelio, and I had this gag where I had a fake hand and I could lop it off and it gushed out blood like, _everywhere_.” He fanned his fingers to mime said gushing, which made Linhardt feel a little more like fainting than he did already. “It was _so_ super cool. I had this big bottle hidden in my bag, and I rigged it up to a little pump — from an aquarium, smart, right? — and then there was some tubing that went up here,” he wagged his arm at him, “and then I wore a — well, that’s not important. The important part is that I could get a full thirty seconds of glorious, bloody waterworks from it, and it looked _super_ realistic.”

“I’m not sure how this is relevant,” Linhardt observed wryly.

“Thirty seconds,” Caspar insisted excitedly. “You can’t kill me in a half a minute, right? Well, I mean, don’t like... _test_ it,” he quickly amended. “Just don’t turn it into an eating contest. I’ll set a timer for thirty seconds, and then you stop when it goes off.”

Linhardt shot him an incredulous look. After all, he’d always prided himself in his self control, but it wasn’t like eating a man was like serving oneself a slice of cake and then deciding logically if they deserved another. Caspar seemed to read his hesitation well enough.

“Er,” he added, glancing across the room. “And if you don’t stop I’ll just... I’ll poke you with something.”

“Poke me?”

“With something silver,” he added, cocking one of his brows testingly. “That hurts you, right?”

“...Right,” Linhardt sighed, suddenly self conscious of his still-burned finger currently casually placed a few centimeters from Caspar’s frustratingly-perfect ass.

“Great! Perfect!”

“Caspar,” Linhardt sighed again, “even if I were to... to agree to this idea, it hardly seems sustainable.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, you’ll look like a pin cushion in a month’s time.”

“I don’t care.”

“That’s easy to say now.”

“Well, just do it in hidden spots,” Caspar suggested, his eyes darting towards Linhardt’s certainly-not-roving hand.

“Absolutely not,” he warned him before he offered up something obscene as his first course. Caspar laughed.

“Diner’s choice!” Linhardt rolled his eyes and let his head flop limply against the floor. Surely he wasn’t really considering Caspar’s utterly inane idea. For one thing, it would be a terrible bother — to eat so little at a time, he’d be doomed to at least twice-weekly feedings, which seemed completely exhausting. And then there was the matter of Caspar’s overly enthusiastic donation, which hardly seemed healthy, even for someone like him. And of course Caspar could say that he was interested now, but what sort of tune would he be singing when he actually had his teeth in him?

He glanced back up at the man in his hover over him, his eyes sparkling with triumph from his idea and his cheeks still flushed, and thought once again how unlucky it was that he was exactly the sort of man that he was.

“..._Fine_,” Linhardt mumbled so lowly that perhaps only those damned wolves downstairs could hear. Caspar’s face beamed ultra-fluorescent bright.

“Really?”

“Thirty seconds,” he added tightly as Caspar tumbled off from him.

“Right, right,” Caspar agreed with a nod, standing to hunt for his phone. He snatched the little silver dish from the nearby dresser next — the least intimidating of the many weapons once brandished in Linhardt’s direction, perhaps, but effective all the same. Linhardt sighed for the thousandth time and slowly drug himself into a sitting position. “Do you think I need anything else?”

“...Take off your belt,” he decided glumly after eyeing him for a moment. “And your shirt.” Caspar grinned and readily complied. “Just your shirt,” Linhardt repeated dryly as he then worked on the button of his jeans.

“Nah,” Caspar told him coyly. Linhardt again mulled on the option of simply sleeping forevermore. Caspar sat beside him pantless before he had the chance to try.

“Okay,” he said next, a little breathless. Linhardt groaned and rubbed his eyes. _Bad idea_, that little voice contended again; _bad, bad idea._

“Set a timer,” Linhardt instructed. Caspar nodded and punched out the number thirty on his phone. He watched him do it, his eyes settling momentarily on the polka dots of his rather skintight briefs; _okay, so maybe it was an alright idea_, that little voice revised. Still, he did his best to look thoroughly put-out as he then gestured at one of the man’s arms. “Here. Give me that.”

“Huh?” Caspar did as he was told despite his confused look, his mouth crooking into a nervous diagonal as Linhardt wound his belt around his bicep and cinched it tight. “Oh,” he realized aloud. “Cool.”

Linhardt hummed noncommittally in reply.

“Like _drugs_.”

“It is _not_ like drugs,” Linhardt insisted bemusedly. “Now, listen. As soon as the timer goes off you need to take that,” he nodded at the little silver dish, “and put it here.” He thumbed his forehead, deciding that that would be a painful enough place to be reminded of the terms of their agreement. Caspar nodded.

“Okay.”

“And do it earlier if you get uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter when, alright?”

“Okay, okay. It’s gonna be okay, Lin.” Linhardt frowned. Surely this was the first time that one of his victims had said anything even remotely so reassuring. “I’m okay.”

In any other circumstance the sheer weight of logic would have stopped Linhardt in what he did next but he was, of course, quite literally falling apart, and so he instead tightened the belt a final time and eyed the vein pulsing quite irresistibly at the crook of Caspar’s elbow and then nodded at him to tap the orange button waiting for them on the face of the man’s phone. Caspar obeyed with what sounded very nearly like an anticipatory squeak — and maybe if Linhardt had still had a heart it would have been pounding as he leaned forward, fangs bared, to prick at the man’s smooth skin with a very, very careful — clinical, even, and yes, it was better to think about clean, sterilized things instead of the delectable heat of him, and that bewitching drumming of his pulse, _dear God_ — bite.

_Ahh._

Now, of course, as previously discussed, Linhardt was unfortunately quiet nauseated by blood. He generally dealt with this sort of thing by keeping his eyes shut firmly closed as he went about his deeds, and doubled-down on the effort by making sure he finished every drop of Jim/Gerald/_et. al._’s life force that would have otherwise made a mess of his mid-century furniture.

In this particular instance, of course, such an approach would never do, and so he instead peeked carefully through his lashes, glancing up and away from his shallow burrow in Caspar’s arm to check on him. The sight he found there — his eyes half-lidded and fogged, his cheeks ruddy, mouth parted with just the pinkest hint of his tongue — reminded him of their less-than-inconspicuous evenings spent writhing together on Caspar’s couch, and them both so thankful for his roommate’s late-night hours — and for the love of all that was holy, then the little bastard dared to _moan_ —

Linhardt scrunched his eyes shut again and made a most valiant effort at not being greedy. It didn’t help, perhaps, that his fingers had fallen from their grip around Caspar’s arm to trail up the muscled front of his chest, but it wasn’t like anyone would have mistaken him for some sort of benevolent monk before, so whatever did you expect?

Somewhere, three-hundred worlds away, Caspar’s phone went _peep, peep, peep!_

And Caspar’s fingers, which were supposed to be brandishing that nasty little dish at him, were instead tangling in his hair, and somehow Linhardt had fallen into a straddle over his lap, and those polka dots patterning the other man’s shorts had no doubt turned nearly diagonal from the strain of —

_fuck, shit, fuck, god fucking —_

“Caspar!” Linhardt wrenched himself backwards, groping for the end of the nearby bed’s sheets as he fumbled together a clumsy tourniquet with his eyes still closed. “I told you to stop me!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Caspar gasped breathlessly, squirming beneath him as Linhardt mashed down against his elbow. Linhardt peeked down at him, hoping with each ounce of faith left inside him that the full twin-sized sheet would be enough to block out the blood no doubt still trickling from the snake-bite he’d left behind. “Sorry, I just... _so good_.”

They stared winded at each other for a half second before Linhardt made good on his new trend of bad decision-making by kissing the dumb idiot right on his dumb, idiot mouth. Caspar gasped another delectable sound, tangling them both in the sheet knotted around his arm as he slid his palms over Linhardt’s bracketed thighs, trailing briefly across the draw of his stomach before —

“Holy shit,” Caspar exclaimed into the back of Linhardt’s throat. He nodded backwards to break their kiss — and no, Linhardt did not make a tiny little disappointed sound, it must have been the wind — his entire body tensing as he directed his cornflower-colored gaze between Linhardt’s legs. “Lin. Your _dick_!”

“Er,” said Linhardt hoarsely. “My what?”

“I thought that it was _broken_!”

Linhardt stared at Caspar. Caspar stared at Linhardt. They both then stared together at the pronounced angle of his fly. If his blood — well, _Caspar’s_ — hadn’t been directed so decidedly southwards perhaps Linhardt would have blushed.

“Excuse me?” Caspar’s mouth remained ajar with wonder.

“Every time, before,” he managed, “it never...”

“Are you really asking for an anatomy lesson?” Linhardt’s dry question made him laugh, if only for a second, because then he was fully dedicated to the task of kissing him again. This time, however, he added in the art of undressing him with a series of rough, jerking yanks.

“Ack, Cas,” Linhardt stuttered as he found his head suddenly shoved in the tangle of his sleeves, his hair knotting in a mess around his face as it was then whipped sideways before Caspar bowed forward to fiddle with his zipper. “Hey, Caspar, wait, what are you—”

Caspar glanced up at him from his lap and offered him a particularly catty grin.

“Let’s use it,” he suggested with a lecherous flick of his brows.

_Yes_, a voice inside him readily agreed; _fantastic idea_. After all, he so very rarely had the pleasure. That was the downside of his eating habits, naturally — not much one could do with a man after he’d already been eaten (well, at least for him, he wasn’t _that_ revolting). And Linhardt supposed that this was why vampires were generally so intrigued by the idea of an orgy; but, of course, he had never been so inclined towards that sort of thing. They were so terribly messy. 

This, however, was a very interesting proposal. Not like Caspar was giving him the benefit of time to mull it over — there went his slacks tugged cleanly aside, paired with a little noise of approval that was absolutely delightful — but here was the problem: something was coming up the stairs. Linhardt had ignored it earlier, because of course he had, he’d been a little preoccupied. But now, although Caspar was making a good show of it himself, Linhardt found it quite difficult to mute the sound of what was almost certainly a pair of claws scratching at the door. A dog begging to be let outside, let’s say, if perhaps under a different set of terms.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Linhardt huffed unconvincingly as Caspar peeled off his own cheery briefs before adding Linhardt’s to the pile.

“Uh, of course it is,” Caspar argued with that very dangerous grin of his. “I like it both ways, you know. You can do whatever you want.”

_This is a bad idea_, that more reasonable voice in his head said very, very quietly.

_Aaaaaaaaaah_, screamed the rest of his ancient brain, loud enough that the scratching at the door suddenly didn’t matter.

“Fuck,” Linhardt relented in a whisper, which earned him his third devilish grin before Caspar bent between his cocked legs. “Aw, _fuck_, Cas.”

“Mnnm,” Caspar agreed. Linhardt gripped at the shaggy quills of his hair and decided in that moment that he was the most fantastic, wonderful, brilliant man that had ever lived. Handsome, clever, fit; good, good, very good, ah, good, good —

The door suddenly crashed open, more splinters than boards.

Bad. Bad. Very bad.

“L-leave him alone!” A voice cried out, feminine and stuttering.

“Grraaahhhaggrr,” said something else covered in fur and far overdue for a bath.

“Caspa-_aagh_!” Came a third voice, this one from a woman not yet turned wolf.

Caspar replied to the trio crowding the doorframe with a very obscene _pop_ of his mouth. And maybe he said something else, but in that moment, of all moments, Linhardt’s clumsy tourniquet had fallen away to reveal a rather benign trickle of blood trailing down his arm.

And so, of course, just like he’d done as a little boy shocked by his father’s unsuccessful shave, Linhardt fainted — and although there were no stairs for him to tumble down this time, it was not perhaps his finest achievement in his very long and godforsaken life.


	10. Fresh Quiche and Raspberry Lube

Linhardt had resumed his doubled-over repose against the kitchen table. This time it wasn’t the woozy drag of his appetite that had pushed him there — in fact, fifty-six seconds of Caspar’s blood had been positively filling — but rather a soul (well, the existential _idea_ of a soul, perhaps)-curdling combination of mortification and annoyance paired with the lingering memory of Caspar’s flushed blue-and-pink nape instead. And although he certainly would never admit it aloud, there was something in that feeling that made him suddenly empathize with Sylvain’s moronic diatribe about erections and self-discipline.

This could only mean one thing, of course; he had finally lost his mind.

“I’m sorry,” Dimitri muttered for the third time. Linhardt ground his forehead against the tabletop. He heard the echo of Caspar’s drumming fingers through the wood.

“Lin would never hurt me,” the latter complained. “I mean, haven’t you ever heard of privacy before?”

“Caspar,” Dimitri sighed, “I’m afraid you don’t fully understand the situation at hand.”

“Sure I do,” came Caspar’s grumpy reply. “And look, I know that you’re Dedue’s friend, but that doesn’t mean that you can just walk around here like you own the place.”

“Caspar,” Dimitri insisted with another belabored sound, “please. Listen to me. I think it would be better if you would just come back to the city with me.”

Linhardt considered kicking Dimitri’s naked foot under the table, but decided against it; after all, he had put all of his eggs into the _clever_ basket, not the _strong-armed_ one, and Dimitri had definitely allocated all of his into the latter. It would hardly be heroic to have the one-eyed _lupus annoyus_ knock him out for a second time (and this time directly).

Not that he wanted to be heroic. Or anything at all, really, other than _not there_.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Caspar huffed. This time Linhardt was relieved to hear him say it. The chair beneath Caspar creaked as the man fidgeted in his spot. “And where did that dog go, anyway?” _Oh, Caspar_, Linhardt would have sighed — and perhaps to a well-timed laugh track, if his life were the sitcom it was very seriously starting to resemble, if not one that would have ever been renewed for season number two.

“The..._dog_,” Dimitri echoed. “That isn’t important.”

“Oh yeah? And what is important, then?”

“Your safety, Caspar.”

“I already told you. I’m perfectly fine.” 

“You’re _bleeding_.” This was an exaggeration. Even Linhardt, with his eyelashes crunched into acute angles against the tabletop, knew that. Of course, Caspar _had_ been bleeding, but it had run its course before Linhardt had come around again — and him blessedly dressed in his unbuttoned slacks, albeit without his briefs beneath. What more, Caspar’s bloodletting had been further abetted by the twin pink bandaids patterned with strawberries and winking unicorns that were now tacked lopsidedly in the crook of his arm. It was Linhardt’s understanding that they were scratch-and-sniff, which seemed to him to be an odd feature for such an object, but we digress. 

“I’m not bleeding,” Caspar insisted himself. “And besides, that was nothing. _And_ it was, like... _enthusiastic consent_.”

“Caspar,” Linhardt finally managed thinly. He didn’t seem to hear him. Linhardt predicted that this was on purpose.

“I must insist that you simply don’t understand the terms of what you’re saying,” Dimitri’s voice interjected. “Now, listen, Caspar. I don’t know what Linhardt has told you — or how he’s explained any of this, really — but what you need to understand is that—”

“He didn’t hypnotize me,” Caspar barked proudly. Linhardt focused the very fiber of his being into tessellating into a thousand tiny Linhardts that would be better suited at running away. It didn’t work. Regrettably.

“Cas,” he insisted into the table.

“Hypnotize?” came Dimitri’s pitched and thoroughly bewildered reply.

“Uh, yeah. Honestly, if anything, I basically made him do it.”

“Caspar,” said Linhardt.

“You made him do it,” the wolffish prince deadpanned. “And what exactly is it that you think you made him do?”

“Well, drink my blood. Obviously.” Linhardt finally bristled into an upward position and did his best to ignore how a strand of his hair had stuck to his lip as he pitched sideways to glare in Caspar’s direction.

“Caspar!” The named man flinched at his admonition, but it was already too late; and yes, there it was, the slow flicker of Dimitri’s tungsten-bulb brain coming to light.

“Drink your...” His eye swung from Caspar to catch Linhardt’s gaze. “Does he... does he _know_..?”

“And here comes our great epiphany,” Linhardt groaned, finally relenting to scrub the hair from his face before pinching the bridge of his nose. “I told you to keep quiet about this, Cas.”

“I’m sorry,” mumbled Caspar, his socked toes nudging apologetically at Linhardt’s shin, as if that was all it took to make up for the crash-and-burn of two thousand years’ worth of careful PR management, and to hell with the fact that somehow it seemed like it _had_ — _goddamn it_.

“Linhardt,” Dimitri ordered in that same moment. Linhardt waved a hand at him to signal his defeat.

“Yes, yes. Go on, then. Do your duty.”

“My duty,” Dimitri sputtered, “surely you understand that it goes beyond that. This is... this is a matter of our security — the longevity of our species—”

“You and I are as much of a kindred species as a beagle and a...” Linhardt would have had a far more witty retort if not for how Caspar had started to rub his foot up the backside of his calf. If he hadn’t brought the case up before, let it be addressed anew: the man was utterly impossible. “And a pair of socks.”

“That isn’t the point,” Dimitri reminded him with a doubly grim tone. “You know the rules, Linhardt; and although I am aware that you are so fond of overlooking them, even you know that this one in particular is not to be broken.”

Linhardt shrugged. He’d of course explained the same to Caspar, essentially, but in that moment he was of the mind to espouse the blue-haired man’s liberal interpretation of the idea. After all, everyone was always so eager to prattle on about rules and expectations, but who had set them first? Was he really supposed to believe that some ancient, toga-wearing demon had clamored up to the crest of some dramatic outcropping of rocks (or was it perhaps into the deepest depths of some pit filled with snakes and shadows and mean-looking mushrooms) to receive the Ten Commandments Heretofore Adjusted for the Likes of Nastier Things? _Thou shalt not not kill_?

And yes, clearly he understood that it would be far preferable for a human to not come to the revelation that they were, essentially, a fattened cow given broader discretion over the borderlines of their paddock. He imagined that there would be quite a panic for the people of the world to realize that their fascination with creepy-crawlies was founded in reality instead of their colorful imaginations. At very least, it had to be assumed that very few of them would have the reaction Caspar had displayed — which was in that moment, for some outrageous reason, a game of footsie. It was objectively adorable (not that Linhardt thought anything was adorable, other than Desdemona, perhaps), but it was also hardly the right time, right place for anything like that.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Not really,” Linhardt admitted with a flutter of his eyelids. “What do you want me to tell you, Dimitri? At least he hasn’t kept me as a pet. Surely that’s a rule somewhere as well, don’t you agree?” Dimitri’s cheeks flamed red. It didn’t flatter him nearly as well as it did Caspar.

“Linhardt,” the werewolf sputtered.

“Huh?” Caspar added, his own face of course flushing as well, and less because he was embarrassed, perhaps, than that he was suddenly considering the idea of a collar and being kept and — well, listen, Linhardt certainly wasn’t thinking about it himself, so let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that this assumption was _projecting_, alright?

“Nothing,” Linhardt replied. He leaned into the table to catch Dimitri’s suddenly bashful gaze. “Listen. I’m not going to _handle it_, if that’s what you mean. I imagine you and I are in agreement there, unless you’ve already forgotten your eternal pledge of protection, or whatever that nonsense was. Caspar can—” _keep a secret_, he’d meant to say, but he’d stopped himself, glancing sideways as he then thought _well, of course he can’t_; Caspar smiled at him in response, no doubt unsure of what exactly was being discussed but happy to be included, “— he’s harmless.”

“Be that as it may,” Dimitri retorted tightly, “this mistake of yours has come at a dire time.” Linhardt rolled his eyes. Everything was dire for Dimitri. Linhardt was convinced that he’d used the exact same line when he’d come to the realization that his supply of Milk Bones had drawn dry. “I’ve traveled north to bring you a message.” This was the most insufferable way that he could have said that he took I-95 N towards Mountainside, but Linhardt supposed this was to be expected. The old fool, living his whole life like some miserable, extended LARP-ing session with his endless cloaks and eyepatches and musty doublets and et cetera, et cetera.

“I have it on good authority,” Dimitri soldiered on, “that Rhea has returned.” Linhardt’s lips quirked into a crooked shape. He heard Bernadetta, until that moment silent in anguish at the idea that she’d interrupted some sort of precursor to Caspar’s being turned, gasp. Perhaps a bell tolled somewhere, scattering a flock of blackbirds into the air as the music to Linhardt’s sitcom-turned-thriller flexed low and droning to signal his impending doom.

“Well, that’s shitty news,” Linhardt sighed. Caspar spun in his chair as he looked between the four of them — Bernadetta, Dimitri, a glowering Ingrid, and his newly-knighted boyfriend — for a hint of what was he meant.

“Who’s Rhea?” Linhardt leaned back into his chair and rubbed his eyes.

“An inconvenience,” he sighed. Bernadetta made a peeping sound. Caspar stared on with all of the enthusiasm of a little boy begging for his most favorite sweet. “She’s an — how does she put it — an exorcist.” Caspar’s eyes grew wide.

“Cool,” he gasped, gripping at the edge of the table. Linhardt quirked his brow into an amused shape.

“Not _cool_,” he promised him. “She exorcises things like _me_.” Caspar’s amazed expression high-dived into a most desperate scowl.

“What? Why would she do that?”

“I suppose you’d have to ask her that question.” Caspar gripped two fists atop the tabletop.

“Well, where is she now?” _Let me at her_, he left unsaid, and with all of the zeal of some movie-cast sidekick with plenty of pizazz and little actual practice in that sort of thing. Linhardt sighed again, this time with an unavoidable dose of affection, before he glanced flatly at Dimitri.

“Well?”

“I don’t know,” he sputtered in response, still apparently taken aback by how easily Caspar had transitioned from _probable prey_ into _conspirator_. “But I have sources who have seen her in the area. Catherine and Shamir as well.”

_Sources_. And why was it that Linhardt suspected that by sources he meant poodles and miniature dachshunds? 

“That’s a bother,” Linhardt admitted.

“More than that. She’ll come for you first, Linhardt.” Caspar leaned further forward over the tabletop, his eyes the size of saucers.

“Why?”

“Because she likes old fogies,” Sylvain answered, suddenly rounding the corner from whatever despicable hole he’d decided to leave behind. He had the same exceptional timing as a car suddenly stalled at the breaching mouth of a draw-bridge. Linhardt tried to set him on fire with his mind. It was a fair enough attempt. Sylvain winked in response. “A proper trophy hunter, her.”

“Old?” Caspar had been transformed into an echo chamber. Linhardt turned his attention on the chair Sylvain had commandeered. It too, unfortunately, refused to combust as he took a seat at Caspar’s side.

“Don’t you have anywhere better to be? A bachelorette party, perhaps?” Sylvain responded by blowing him a kiss. Linhardt wondered briefly if venereal diseases were ever airborne. “After everything you’ve done I think she’ll be more excited to mount you on her wall than anyone else.”

“Of course,” Sylvain retorted just as Linhardt realized his mistake. “Who doesn’t want to mount me?”

“Go die.” Sylvain laughed.

“Geeze, Linda. That’s the best you’ve got?” He stretched his arms over his head, groaning slightly as he worked out a kink. “Honestly, you’d be doing me a favor. I’ve been thinking about getting an upgrade. Old bones, you know?” He jumped slightly as he then turned and realized that Caspar had scooted closer to him with an inspector’s narrowed eye. “Uh. Hey there, Cas.”

“Are you a vampire too?” Sylvain’s eyes darted from Caspar’s look of concentration to Dimitri’s blanched stare. His lips split into a wide grin.

“Oh no. I’m _much_ better than that.” Linhardt rolled his eyes with such force that they attained their own gravitational pull. He snatched at Caspar next, squeaking his chair closer to his own and away from Sylvain’s immediate reach.

“He’s an incubus. Don’t touch him.”

“_Linhardt_,” Dimitri gasped in admonishment. “You can’t just identify ever—”

“And he’s a werewolf,” Linhardt interjected flatly as he pointed in his direction. Caspar squeaked.

“_Really_?”

“Linhardt!”

“For god’s sake, Dimitri, it’s not like you’re particularly inconspicuous.” No matter that Caspar had somehow missed that the wolf who had torn down their bedroom door had then run into the neighboring bathroom, and that a six-foot-tall blond wearing nothing but a towel had emerged. Honestly, it seemed like a public service to tell him the truth. “Is that all, then?” Dimitri’s chest puffed wide.

“Is that all? It’s hardly the beginning! We need to formulate a plan of how to address—”

“Don’t be dense. Just call the Professor. She’s dealt with it before.”

“I wouldn’t know the first place to look,” Dimitri contended, his shoulders still braced in some misguided attempt to look bigger and therefore more — what was it? Authoritative, Linhardt supposed. It did not have its intended effect, although perhaps Ingrid at least looked mildly impressed. “The Professor is a woman of her own..._fancy_.” Linhardt snorted.

“For a big, bad wolf, you certainly are terribly sensitive, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?” Linhardt looked to Caspar instead of answering Dimitri’s newest bluster directly. Caspar, predictably, looked entirely enraptured by the discussion.

“Who’s the Professor?” He so graciously asked. For once Linhardt was thankful for his curiosity — at least it would, if however briefly, shut Dimitri up.

“She’s... an _exorcist_ exorcist, let’s say. And although she is apparently no longer on speaking terms with our dear Dimitri, I happen to know for a fact that she is back at work after a long and hopefully relaxing sabbatical. At your alma mater, in fact.”

“She’s a professor?” _Oh, Caspar_.

“That would be the source of the name. Perhaps you would have been acquainted with her yourself in your own studies, but as it so happens she has been, until quite recently, rather busy abroad.” Linhardt heard Dimitri groan. Maybe it was a little cruel of him to be the bearer of bad news, but he was rather miffed with the old dog.

“She _wasn’t_,” Dimitri questioned grimly. Linhardt smirked and nodded.

“Yes. As I understand it, she’s returned to good terms with an old friend.”

“It seems as though you’ve had the chance to catch up.”

“Of course,” Linhardt sniffed. “I’ve done nothing to put myself in her poor graces myself. In any case, I’m sure as long as we ask nicely she’ll be game to play along. This isn’t the first time Rhea has come sniffing. I hardly think it’s worth the bother to be... bothered.” He yawned.

“Linhardt—” Dimitri continued, apparently not yet satisfied by his diatribe, but he was cut short by the sound of a set of footsteps slowly thundering down the nearby stairs.

“Look who’s feeling better,” a voice cried out. It was perhaps the strangest tone Linhardt had ever heard — sugary-sweet and sing-song, but in a way that was thoroughly curdled. Was it some siren, he wondered briefly as he turned in his chair — or no, a harpy, definitely a harpy or, perhaps —

_Oh_. No. Of course. He sighed. It was just Hubert, himself a full arm’s distance from Ferdinand, whom he was ushering gingerly down the stairs, and with his fingers hovering above the red-head’s shoulders. Ferdinand had bathed, bless him, and even dressed himself in something clean. He looked more like himself, which is to say that he took on the perfected part of the insufferable sunny yin to Hubert’s perpetually-rotten yang. Still, the smile he offered to the table as he dismounted from the staircase was uneasy enough to make it clear that he was still Not Okay with his recent transformation.

“Ferdie!” Caspar leapt from his chair and barreled towards Ferdinand.

“Caspar!” Linhardt’s barked order stopped him just before he’d thrown his arms around Ferdinand’s shoulders. They both looked back at in him surprise. He sighed and ground the knuckle of his right thumb into his eyes.

“No touching,” he suggested thinly. Caspar blushed, no doubt shocked at his partner’s unexpected jealousy. Ferdinand turned a disquieting shade of grey, apparently interpreting Linhardt’s interjection as a means to protect Caspar from the monster he’d become. Of course the truth of it was that the charm still strung around Caspar’s neck would have jolted Ferdinand’s long hair on end, but, quite honestly, he was content with them running away with their own imaginations for a while. 

“Hello, Caspar,” Ferdinand managed, staring at his toes.

“Hey, Ferdie,” Caspar answered, shoving his hands into his pockets with a slight pout. Linhardt was briefly reminded of two puppies who had just clonked their heads together and were too dazed to understand how to carry on.

“How are you feeling?” Caspar asked the frayed toe of his left sock.

“Much better, thank you,” Ferdinand answered, his own red woolen socks offering no reply.

“I thought perhaps it would be nice for us to all take a walk outside,” Hubert interjected. Each word seemed exquisitely painful for him to say. Linhardt savored the moment. Dimitri’s face fell.

“Oh no,” he replied rather urgently. “We can’t. Not yet. Dedue is making quiche.” He pointed over his shoulder towards the kitchen with all of the severity of a man ordering his troops to war. Linhardt decided in that moment that he was perhaps living in a fever dream.

* * *

An hour later — with the wolves and Caspar properly fed, the latter of whom had eaten four servings of spinach-and-ham quiche alone, and much to to the delight of Dedue, and to Linhardt’s mild horror — they all found themselves waiting for Hubert to dress Ferdinand in his coat at the top of the stairs outside. Ferdinand allowed him to slip his arm into a sleeve, his head already covered with a hat topped with a comical pom-pom perhaps not quite befitting his new _raison d’être_. Linhardt wasn’t certain if this was a sign that he had begun to forgive his dead-eyed companion or if Hubert was simply doomed forevermore to beg for his contrition. Honestly, he was hoping for the latter. Perhaps it would force him to resign. 

“It’s so nice out,” Caspar sighed beside him, huffing out a silvery breath as he rubbed his mittens together. “I love getting out of the city. Don’t you?”

“Hmm,” Linhardt replied. Caspar offered him a scrunch-nosed grin.

“Aww, come on. It will be fun. Don’t you ever go hiking?”

“Do I _look_ like the kind of person who goes hiking?” Caspar laughed and threaded his arm through Linhardt’s crossed elbows and teased him forward across the yard.

“Sure. I mean, you have green hair.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“Like a tree!” Linhardt groaned but allowed himself the slightest hint of a grin. Caspar, emboldened, quickened his pace slightly as the rest followed them behind.

“I’m not a tree,” Linhardt countered as they found the mouth of a nearby path. “Although I suppose I wouldn’t mind being one. It certainly seems relaxing.” Caspar puffed another laugh.

“Yeah, I can see that. Well, I’d go climbing in your branches, then.” Linhardt cocked one of his brows.

“You’d most certainly fall.” Caspar smiled, his cheeks turning a little red like the frosted tip of his nose.

“I did, once. When I was little. We had a big old oak in our front yard. I climbed all the way to the top and then fell allll the way to the bottom. Broke my arm _and_ my ankle at the same time. Different sides.”

“Impressive,” Linhardt quipped.

“Right? I think my dad didn’t know if he was supposed to be more upset with me or the tree.” Caspar’s grin faltered slightly. His eyes darted to his feet. “Anyway. Maybe don’t turn into a tree. I like you better this way.” Linhardt nodded and tightened their locked elbows, if only a little bit.

“You really can’t tell anyone, you know,” he tested a few moments later. “About anything you’ve learned today.”

“Oh, I know. Really. Scout’s honor.”

“Not even if it seems like you can trust them,” Linhardt added. Catherine was known to do that sort of thing — embed, the tricky little villain. If she had really accompanied Rhea on her newest hunt there was no doubt that she would find Caspar to be an easy target. Not that Linhardt wasn’t already pulling double-duty in keeping him away from people like that.

“I’m not gonna _betray_ you, Lin,” Caspar sighed. “I’m gonna _protect_ you.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah!” Caspar made a good impression of Dimitri’s own chest-puffing from some time before. “I mean, we have to look out for one another, right?”

“Right.” They lingered at a fork in the path before selecting the more shadowy and foreboding option.

“So I guess we’re gonna go back home soon, then?” Linhardt glanced over at Caspar’s good intuition.

“Yes. As it appears that Dimitri will be utterly useless in every regard, I suppose that the task of contacting the Professor will fall to me.”

“Is she a vampire, too?” Linhardt’s smile turned lopsided; Caspar really was going to have to learn the art of nuanced language.

“No,” he managed. “She’s just a woman. Well, she was, at least, once. And then...” He glanced over his shoulder and saw that they were alone, the others having no doubt picked the sunnier path forward. Well, he supposed there was no harm in a little storytelling. “She found a djinn and wished for a life immortal. So I suppose she’s in a class of her own, really.”

“A djinn? You mean like a _genie_?” Linhardt nodded. Caspar laughed. “This is crazy. Is there anything out there that’s _not_ real?”

“That’s a bit of a difficult question to answer,” Linhardt countered dryly. “In any case, she was once quite close to our friend Rhea until they had a...falling out. A fundamental disagreement on a few key ideals, let’s say. Of anyone she’s the best at curbing Rhea’s bad behavior. It doesn’t hurt that she can’t die — rather an inconvenience, otherwise.”

“And she knows Dimitri, too?”

“Yes. They were, at one point _involved_. Thankfully she eventually came to her wits. He’s a proper brute, you know. After their falling out she left for some grand journey to the east. You know how it goes — self discovery, that sort of thing. Terribly dull, if you ask me. As I understand it, however, she ended up digging up that old djinn of hers again, so no doubt you’ll make his acquaintance eventually as well.”

“Is...is he _blue_?” This question was enough to stop Linhardt in his tracks. _You’re the blue one_, he was tempted to say.

“No,” he replied instead. “Well, I don’t think so, at least. They’re shape-shifters. But he’s always been a bit of a narcissist, so just be wary about anything unusually handsome.” Caspar grinned and leaned sideways to rub his cheek against Linhardt’s shoulder.

“I’ve found one.” Linhardt rolled his eyes.

“Honestly, Caspar.”

“Hey,” Caspar continued on smoothly. “What Sylvain said before—”

“As a rule of thumb,” Linhardt interrupted, “don’t ever listen to Sylvain.”

“But what he said. Are you...” _Old_, Linhardt suspected, that tawdry, dusty word. He sighed.

“Listen,” he relented. “I was a little boy once, too. I even fell off a few tree branches of my own. And then I grew a little older and made the choice to become what I am now. We’re very different, you and I, but not in every way. Just on a different scale.” Caspar nodded.

“Okay.”

The path had opened into a clearing. It was, Linhardt admitted to himself with some hesitation, rather picturesque. The snow there was still untouched and sparkling in the sun. He felt Caspar tense beside him from the anticipation of running forward. He smiled. It was rather like him, really — always dashing around to leave his mark. They picked forward together, bowing first beneath a fallen tree that was blocking their way. When they righted themselves again they made the grave mistake of disturbing a nearby sapling. Linhardt gasped as a full tree-ful of snow dusted his head and snuck down his collar.

“Aw, Lin!” Caspar laughed and bumped against him as he tried in vain to brush the snow away. Linhardt scrunched his eyes closed and hoped for the best that the man’s sweeping fingers didn’t poke one out. “Be careful.”

“I _am_ careful.” He was, in fact, quite cautious as he slowly opened his eyes again at the sudden warmth of Caspar’s breath against his cheeks. The wintery forest scene around them had been replaced by his blue eyes.

“You’re so pretty,” Caspar admitted under his breath. _I’m not pretty_, Linhardt insisted again, but this time without wasting the effort to speak. He frowned instead, which seemed to positively charm Caspar. “Can I kiss you?”

“I suppose,” said Linhardt, although he was the first to lean forward to make good on the idea. And it was a shame, he supposed in that very moment, that he no longer had a heart.

They kissed. At some point Linhardt found himself half-buried in the snow. In any other circumstance he would have hissed and pouted like Desdemona during a bath to find the back of his jacket suddenly damp from the snow, but in the moment he was far more distracted by Caspar’s roaming hands. This was acceptable, he decided quickly: it wasn’t like he’d ever heard of a vampire freezing to death before.

“Lin,” Caspar breathed into the crook of his neck. “Lin,” into the shell of his ear. Linhardt finally concluded that he didn’t truly hate the nickname. He busied himself with the zipper of Caspar’s jacket instead, pleased by the little gasp he earned as he slipped his fingers into the heat trapped inside.

“Aww,” Caspar said suddenly, his delectably whispered tone suddenly transformed into cartoonish dejection. Linhardt pulled back and stared at him incredulously before he recognized the touch of Caspar’s hand down the front of his pants. He was vaguely aware that he should have been embarrassed.

“It doesn’t last very long,” he managed, training his voice aloof instead of the squeaking sound that it might have taken otherwise. Caspar’s pink-kissed lips twisted into a pout.

“It’s been like... _three_ hours.” And so maybe it was alright, really, that he didn’t have a heart.

“Sorry.” Linhardt wasn’t quite sure what else to say. He realized that this was a mistake just as a freshly-mischievous glint sparked in Caspar’s eyes.

“Just bite me again,” he suggested, already tugging at his collar.

“No.” Caspar loomed ever closer.

“Come on. Just a little.”

“I’m going to _just a little_ you to death if we aren’t careful,” Linhardt argued dryly as he pushed back against the immovable boulder that was Caspar’s chest. “Enough. Besides, it’s too cold out here. You’re going to get sick.”

“I am not,” Caspar insisted as he boxed Linhardt against the tree that they’d implicated in their debauchery. Linhardt frowned as he snatched one of his hands and cupped it over his ass with a very suggestive wag of his eyebrows. “Before we left, when you were talking to Sylvain, I — _you know_.” He winked. “We can be quick.”

“Absolutely not.” It was the least convincing thing he’d ever said, which was quite a significant accomplishment for a lifespan that had seen the advance from bronze to iron age in real-time. Caspar’s eyes glittered dangerously.

“You don’t want to?”

“That isn’t the point,” Linhardt ordered as he watched Caspar, for some unspoken reason, begin to peel off his left mitten. “What are you doing?” Caspar grinned as he waved his fingers with all of the theatrics of dangling a feather in front of Linhardt’s beloved feline.

“You don’t have to see it,” Caspar suggested cannily. “Just bite my hand and I’ll put my mitten back on.”

“Cas. No.” Caspar kissed him before he could continue to harangue the idea.

“Nobody’s ever bled to death because they cut their hand. Come on, Lin. Please?”

And firstly, what sort of claim was that? People died from all sorts of things: drinking water from muddy puddles, traipsing near open manholes — the point was that Linhardt wasn’t so eager to test the idea. And it wasn’t like Caspar was about to be torn away to war. He just needed to be _patient_, for God’s sake. If it was really such a trouble they could hunt out some sort of rest stop on their way home, as long as Desdemona agreed and as long as the place wasn’t too terribly filthy. And even then it was a five hour drive at most, maybe four if Linhardt was willing to cheat the speed limit a bit, and no doubt to Caspar’s urging. There was absolutely no need for this type of reckless behavior. Furthermore —

Furthermore, Linhardt had already sunk his teeth into his palm.

“Ahh,” Caspar gasped, and positively obscenely. Linhardt felt himself being dragged head-over-heels into a deep, dark pit filled to the brim with very bad decisions. It’s not like it was even his fault, really. After all, dangle a thick, juicy steak in front of a dog for long enough and it’s really a challenge against evolution and nature and all other sorts of grand, important things for them to _not_ leap forward for a bite. Right?

Linhardt pushed him away again before he took the steak-eating analogy too seriously. Caspar had the look of a man who had just earned an Olympic gold medal as he eased his mitten back on. It was in this moment that Linhardt realized he was, quite frankly, in a good bit of danger for having associated himself with a man like him.

“Better,” Caspar purred as he battled with Linhardt’s fly again. Linhardt probably should have offered another barbed retort, but whatever was the point? Instead he admitted defeat by dancing his fingers forward to unbutton Caspar’s jeans. Afterwards he was distilled into a set of gasping noises, and was relieved only by the fact that there was no one else there to hear them. It would have ruined his reputation, at the very least.

“Cas,” he moaned finally as the man settled on his lap, and him apparently some breed of horny wizard, having procured a bottle of pink-tinted lube from God knows where. Not that it was terribly necessary — whatever the little deviant had done to himself while Linhardt was “talking to Sylvain” had been quite notably successful.

“Lin.” And it was stupid, really, how those little nicknames had already become such a natural call-and-response. And it was _stupid_ how stupidly handsome he looked, his face rose-colored from the cold or from his blushing, it didn’t really matter — just that it suited him so well. And it was _stupid_ how much he wanted him, and not just in the obvious way, but in other ways more so.

“Cas, listen,” Linhardt said in a half-whisper before they’d advanced their heavy petting into something more defined. A handful of words cluttered together in his mind. He wasn’t quite sure how to string them together — had never really said them before. Caspar’s blush deepened as he suddenly reached forward to stroke his flushed cheek. “I think — well, I suppose you should know that I think that I lo—”

Linhardt was cut short by the sudden snap of an arrow as it buried itself in the bark of the trunk beside his head.

“Who dares draw blood in this sacred wood?” a voice boomed, dripping with all of the magical malice of some sort of no-doubt enchanted creature. _Stupid_, Linhardt realized as he clenched Caspar to his chest before the shocked-stiff man turned and challenged whatever it was that had interrupted them to a match of bare-assed fisticuffs. Even so, a shadow descended closer to them from across the frosty glade. He could just make out the glimmer of another arrow drawn and ready for them if they misbehaved.

Yes, Linhardt decided then — this was all just a bit too stupid for even him to believe.


End file.
